Admiring accounts of some genuinely admirable American sailors.
Biographies of nine more or less heroic members of the U.S. Navy.
Having told the stories of 10 great admirals throughout history in his previous book, Sailing True North, Stavridis, a former four-star admiral and prolific author, delivers a follow-up that limits his key players to the U.S. All histories of the American Navy begin with John Paul Jones, who became a Revolutionary War hero by capturing a British frigate after a brutal battle in which his own ship sank. Perhaps America’s most brilliant fighting captain, Stephen Decatur performed heroically in the Barbary Wars in North Africa and the War of 1812 before dying in a duel with a fellow officer. In 1898, George Dewey had no trouble annihilating a feeble Spanish fleet in Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War, but Stavridis admires his careful planning and good sense. Adm. David Farragut won his victories during the Civil War against more formidable opposition, and William “Bull” Halsey did the same against Japan in World War II—although he may be better known for occasions when his pugnacity did more harm than good. The author’s sole African American service member, Doris Miller, and only woman, Michelle Howard, have no discernible flaws, but their stories illustrate the racism and sexism that have permeated the Navy since its founding. Stavridis works hard to find common threads among his subjects, and each chapter includes insights into their characters, stressing those qualities responsible for their triumphs, which readers can put to use in their own lives. An expert in his field, the author is not shy about deploring character defects that tarnished some achievements. For example, Jones was bad-tempered, Halsey impulsive, and Decatur too easily offended. Contemporary Navy leadership does not escape censure for stripping Capt. Brett Crozier of command of the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt when he criticized its delay in handling an early Covid-19 outbreak aboard his ship.
Admiring accounts of some genuinely admirable American sailors.Pub Date: May 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-29774-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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 Yorker staff 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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