For World War II enthusiasts, a fine history of an iconic battle.
The final campaign against Japan receives expert handling.
Former AP reporter and veteran military historian Wheelan (Midnight in the Pacific: Guadalcanal—The World War II Battle That Turned the Tide of War, 2017, etc.) reminds readers that by the time an immense armada descended on the island of Okinawa on April 1, 1945, Japanese leaders knew the war was lost. With victory out of the question, defenders concentrated on the mountainous south, where they dug massive underground shelters and tunnels, producing a huge interconnected complex largely immune to Allied firepower. It was also invisible from the air, so the invaders did not know what they were getting into. Taking lessons from earlier landings where resistance survived intense bombing, American ships and planes delivered the greatest bombardment of the war, which devastated Okinawans and their cities but barely touched the defenses. American forces met little opposition at first, but the Japanese had also learned from earlier battles that defending beaches was impossible in the face of superior naval firepower. Wheelan describes the brutal fighting that seized northern Okinawa and the surrounding islands over the next few weeks before turning to the main resistance in the south which soldiers encountered a week after landing. The campaign that followed featured heroism on both sides, horrendous casualties and suffering as well as atrocities—mostly but not entirely by the Japanese—as U.S. forces slowly battled south. “The battle of Okinawa,” writes the author, “was neither the climax nor the resolution of the Pacific war, but its battle royale—fought by the United States with crushing power and ferocity, and by Japanese forces with calculation, abandon, and fatalism.” Wheelan delivers excellent analyses and anecdotes and biographies of individuals from both sides, but the narrative is mostly a long series of unit-level actions down to the company and platoon level. Military buffs will eat them up, but general readers may skim.<
For World War II enthusiasts, a fine history of an iconic battle.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-306-90322-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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