An outstanding addition to the still-active genre of WWII histories focusing on a single unit, ship, or bomber.
The captivating story of a World War II destroyer that saw plenty of action.
While conducting research on the Plunkett, which was “all over the place, intersecting with the greatest events and personages of the war,” Sullivan discovered that several crew members were still alive, so he interviewed nonagenarian veterans, as well as their children and grandchildren, in addition to his diligent combing of archives, journals, and ship’s logs. The result is a vivid portrait of the sailors, wives, girlfriends, and families and their world, in which the Plunkett’s battles often seem like interludes. As is typical in war, tedium was the norm, excitement came at rare intervals, and one horrendous incident ensured the ship’s place in history. Launched in 1940, the Plunkett was one of 514 destroyers that fought WWII; 71 were lost, the most of any ship. Even before war broke out, the Plunkett escorted convoys to Britain across the North Atlantic. In November 1942, it accompanied a massive fleet and army that crossed to North Africa during Operation Torch. In July 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily, and the Luftwaffe sank many Allied ships—but not the Plunkett, which also narrowly escaped damage during the invasion of the Italian mainland at Salerno. Matters changed on Jan. 24, 1944 in the sea off Anzio, where a swarm of attackers seemed to target the Plunkett. Countless bombs missed, but one struck, causing terrible damage and killing 53 men. Sullivan delivers a gripping account of what followed as the men fought the fires, rescued survivors, retrieved bodies and body parts, and limped into harbor. After three months of repairs in the U.S., the ship returned to Europe to serve again. Sullivan has done his homework, and readers will enjoy his generous digressions into biography, courtship, shore-leave horseplay, shipboard politics, and a postwar summary.
An outstanding addition to the still-active genre of WWII histories focusing on a single unit, ship, or bomber.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982147-63-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
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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