A memorable account of training, service and heroism.
World War II historian Wukovits (“Bull” Halsey: The Life and Wars of the Navy's Most Controversial Commander, 2010, etc.) commemorates the heroism and sacrifice on board the USS Samuel B. Roberts.
Named for Samuel Booker Roberts, who sacrificed his life to save others at the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942, the destroyer escort and its crew rose to the challenge of trying to screen the protecting aircraft carriers from an oncoming Japanese heavy cruiser task force. The escort ship, loaded with radar and sonar equipment, was not designed for battle, but for locating airborne and underwater hostiles for others to engage. Nearly half of the crew’s 200 men lost their lives during the battle and afterward, while survivors were fighting to stay alive in the ocean. Debate about how the events occurred began promptly, with attention focusing on the absence of forces assigned to the protective screen, which was chasing after a Japanese aircraft carrier task force. The debate still continues, and Wukovits weaves the discussion into his battle narrative. The author prepares his ground with an account of the recruitment and training of the ship's crew and its officers, and he spotlights the leading contribution of Lt. Cmdr. Robert W. Copeland, whose insistence on the highest standards of training for combat readiness prepared the crew and ship for what lay ahead. Wukovits worked with survivors and their family members compiling detailed accounts of the lives of as many of the junior officers and enlisted men as possible. The author also includes a chronology and list of the crew.
A memorable account of training, service and heroism.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-68189-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
HISTORY | HISTORY | MILITARY | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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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