Duffy’s portrait of the South Pacific is an entertaining and well-researched war history that will satisfy intrigued novices...
A history of the battle for the island of New Guinea during World War II.
Duffy (The Sinking of the Laconia and the U-Boat War: Disaster in the Mid-Atlantic, 2013, etc.) sets out to tell the “forgotten” story of Allied Commander in Chief Douglas MacArthur’s battle against the Imperial Japanese Army for the seemingly inconsequential island of New Guinea. It’s a bit misleading to classify this story as forgotten, given the breadth of war scholarship available, and little about Duffy’s account of the events that transpired to beat back Japanese encroachment throughout the South Pacific appears new or revelatory. Nevertheless, the author ably reconstructs the chronology of battles that were pivotal to staving off the Japanese and their ambitious yet foolhardy goal of limitless military expansion. The empire sought the island of New Guinea as an offensive against Australia and ultimately against Allied forces taking strategic positions in the South Pacific. The American-led coalition focused their efforts on the strategic New Guinea city of Port Moresby on the southern side of the island as well as the port of Rabaul, located on the nearby island of New Britain. MacArthur’s strategy of isolating groups of Japanese troops across the island to cut them off from supply chains forced them to either surrender, starve, or die of disease, which was rampant in the tropical jungles of the region. Duffy expertly unwinds the many disparate threads that make up wartime planning and communication, contrasting strategy with outcome and showing how the chain of command truly takes control in an otherwise chaotic situation. For all his careful reconstructing, Duffy is often exhaustively detailed, but his thoroughness pays off. The events of the war are elegantly retold, and while they may not be forgotten, they are certainly overlooked. This book could change that.
Duffy’s portrait of the South Pacific is an entertaining and well-researched war history that will satisfy intrigued novices and devoted students alike.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-41830-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: NAL Caliber/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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