Certainly flawed, but it should appeal to readers who enjoy a good adventure and/or war story.
The story of how one man’s struggle to free his family after the fall of the Philippines in World War II inspired him to create new weapons systems that hastened the Allied victory.
Military historian Bruning (Battle for the North Atlantic: The Strategic Naval Campaign that Won World War II in Europe, 2013, etc.) tells the story of Paul Irvin “Pappy” Gunn (1899-1957), a former Navy man who rose through the ranks to become one of the hottest aviators in the service before retiring to start Philippine Air Lines. Living in Manila with his wife and children, Gunn enjoyed the good life—yet he well knew the danger of Japanese expansion. After Pearl Harbor, he laid plans to get them to safety using his company’s planes. But the situation deteriorated faster than anyone expected, and Gunn was back in the war effort, using the airline’s planes to move Army personnel and equipment. When Manila fell, he was on a long-distance mission, too far away to save his family, who went into a prison camp. Gunn’s attempts to find a way back to rescue them never got off the ground; instead, he turned to tinkering on planes. His major coup was converting the B-25 medium bomber into a gunship, a new weapon that turned the tide against the Japanese navy. Bruning also follows the family’s grueling experiences in the prison. This is a compelling story with strong characters and a wealth of fascinating incidents, set against some of the fiercest action of the war. However, the author spends too much time going into bits of back story; while these passages fill in the portrait of Gunn, they slow down the flow of the main story. Bruning’s writing is workmanlike but never really smooth, and he sometimes neglects the larger context. Fortunately, the subject matter is strong enough, on the whole, to carry readers along.
Certainly flawed, but it should appeal to readers who enjoy a good adventure and/or war story.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-33940-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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