A spirited, comprehensive and highly readable account of the tremendous wherewithal required for this extraordinary effort.
A new treatment of the daring Doolittle raids over Tokyo that fills in many of the gaps in the true story.
In his glowing assessment of the bravery and innovation of the Doolittle raiders, historian Scott (The War Below: The Story of Three Submarines That Battled Japan, 2013, etc.) does not neglect to explore the ultimate horrendous cost of the mission in human lives. After the sneak attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt and his military commanders were desperate for a retaliatory measure that would help buoy national morale. Figuring out how to wage a bombing mission over Tokyo took the best heads of the Navy and Air Force, specifically Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold’s staff troubleshooter, the legendary racing pilot Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle. Immediately taking up the mission and demanding that he also lead it, Doolittle chose the “aerial workhorse” B-25 as the sole craft whose wingspan could clear the superstructure of an aircraft carrier. The problem was the fuel load required to fly from a Pacific carrier to Tokyo then onward to China—landing at approved airfields not in the control of the Japanese—all while keeping absolute secrecy. Spotted by the Japanese well over 800 miles from Tokyo (they were supposed to get 200 miles closer), the all-volunteer crews of the 16 bombers aboard the carrier knew when they took off on April 18, 1942, that they had little chance of reaching the Chinese coast. Of the 80 men, 61 survived the war; four died in crash landings, and four fell into the brutal hands of the Japanese. The damage to Tokyo spurred the Japanese to focus next on Midway, while the Japanese retaliatory slaughter against the Chinese as a result of the raids totaled some 250,000 deaths, a fact that Scott does not fail to note.
A spirited, comprehensive and highly readable account of the tremendous wherewithal required for this extraordinary effort.Pub Date: April 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-08962-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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