Wilson (Retreat, Hell!, 1988) movingly relates a small event in the Vietnam War—a night attack by North Vietnamese soldiers on Fire Base Tomahawk, a hill held by American troops—and its large effects on an ordinary Kentucky town. In a folksy, conversational style, Wilson briefly sums up Bardstown's history, from its founding as a frontier town in 1780, through its 19th-century eminence as a center of the bourbon industry and of Catholic learning and piety (Bardstown was made a diocese in 1808, at the same time as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York), to its small-town present. Wilson depicts Vietnam War-era Bardstown as a neighborly place where residents didn't have to lock their doors, where everyone knew everyone else, and where love of God and of country were constants. Against this background, the author tells the story of the 105 Bardstown men who made up Battery C of the 138th Artillery of the Kentucky National Guard. These men, mostly in their 20s, were engaged in the unspectacular business of starting families and finding livelihoods when Clark Clifford announced a general call-up of the National Guard on April 11, 1968. Relying extensively on interviews with survivors and their wives, Wilson tells the tale of how the men endured basic training, the different ways in which they bore the sorrow of parting from their wives, and their disorienting arrival in Vietnam. Their assignment, along with regular Army soldiers, to the strategically meaningless Fire Base Tomahawk—a low hill surrounded by much higher ones—resulted, on the night of June 19, 1969, in a hellish attack by North Vietnamese guerilla fighters in which ten Bardstown Guardsmen were killed. Wilson tells of Bardstown's shock at the news of the dead and the permanent scars that marked the wives, friends, and children left behind. Absorbing and poignant. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-57737-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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