In this riveting revisionist study, British historian Costello (Ten Days to Destiny, 1991, etc.) rethinks the events leading up to the start of WW II in the Pacific. In coordinated surprise attacks on December 78, 1941, Japanese forces destroyed the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor and wiped out the American air base at Clark Field in the Philippines. An official naval inquiry fixed blame on Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter C. Short, commanders at the Hawaii naval base, for the loss of the American fleet. Costello argues that the official inquiry was an exercise in scapegoating aimed at clearing the real culprits: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and General Douglas MacArthur. Drawing on recently declassified material, Costello asserts that flawed policy, poor strategic thinking, diplomatic blunders, and intelligence failures were responsible for the disasters at Pearl Harbor and Clark Field. He further argues, against the conventional wisdom, that the loss of American air power in the Philippines was more significant than the destruction of the American battleships in Hawaii, because it made possible Japan's lightning conquests throughout Asia early in the war. Costello also details incredible intelligence failures (well documented in other studies) in which critical Japanese naval communications were left unread, despite the fact that US intelligence had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes. More controversially, Costello argues that Roosevelt and Churchill entered into a secret agreement that committed the United States to defend the British Empire in the Far East, that the US Air Force was dangerously overextended, and that MacArthur failed to obey orders to launch an attack against Japanese bases. Finally, Costello contends that the Roosevelt administration engaged in an extensive cover-up designed to avoid dividing the country during wartime. Costello, having done his homework and strongly made his case, is sure to provoke argument among historians and WW II buffs.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-76985-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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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