Dedicated military buffs have a bottomless appetite for such battle minutia, but general readers may feel the urge to skim.
In the first of a planned two-volume account, McManus (Military History/Univ. of Missouri, Rolla; Alamo in the Ardennes: The Untold Story of the American Soldiers Who Made the Defense of Bastogne Possible, 2005, etc.) offers a nuts-and-bolts chronicle of the only regiment to serve in every American war since the 19th century.
The author begins with the regiment’s arrival in Japan in September 1950, two months after North Korea’s invasion of the South. A victim of America’s frantic post–World War II demobilization, the 7th was so understaffed that authorities swept up 2,000 young South Korean men and shipped them to Japan to fill out the ranks. In November the regiment came ashore in North Korea to support advancing UN forces. Within weeks disaster struck as massive Chinese forces attacked, and the 7th endured brutal assaults in bitter cold defending its bridgehead, the only refuge for Marines retreating south. After its evacuation, the regiment joined UN forces south of the 38th parallel, and McManus recounts the subsequent brutal two-and-a-half-year war of attrition in 60 pages packed with anecdotes and small-unit clashes. When the 1950s reorganization replaced regiments with battle groups, the 7th was split between two divisions. Only one battalion served in Vietnam, and McManus dutifully records its four years (1966–70) of frustrating combat. Reforms during the ’80s—of which the author clearly approves—converted the army into today’s high-tech, all-volunteer force. Unlike cynical Korean- and Vietnam-era soldiers, the Gulf War professionals proclaimed fierce patriotism and absolute conviction that they were defending freedom. In McManus’s account of the 7th’s performance in both wars, acute readers will note the resemblance to a video game: Despite plenty of loud noises, explosions, confusion and massive slaughter of the enemy, the heroes—with a rare exception that provokes widespread horror—emerge unscathed.
Dedicated military buffs have a bottomless appetite for such battle minutia, but general readers may feel the urge to skim.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7653-0305-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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