Current-day readers, accustomed to an era of perpetual war with no end in sight, will find this expert, nuts-and-bolts...
A new history of the significant World War II battle in the Pacific, published to coincide with the 75th anniversary.
The battle of Guadalcanal, which lasted from August 1942 to February 1943, has produced a torrent of histories, many by the participants, but first-time readers will have no complaints about this straightforward account by journalist and historian Wheelan (Their Last Full Measure: The Final Days of the Civil War, 2015 etc.). Despite the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Allied leaders agreed that fighting Hitler took priority. Only fleet commander Ernest King disagreed, and when the Japanese began building an airfield on the obscure island of Guadalcanal, his warning that this might enable Japan to sever sea lanes to Australia persuaded American military leaders to take action. A hastily assembled Marine force under Gen. Alexander Vandegrift landed on the island, which contained mostly construction workers who fled. Underestimating the number and fighting quality of the Marines, the Japanese landed small and then increasingly large forces, but their banzai charges, which proved to be successful against poorly trained troops in China, did not work against the Marines—although several bloody assaults almost succeeded. Over the next months, the American Navy grew increasingly aggressive, more planes and reinforcements arrived, and the American position became impregnable. In November 1942, Vandegrift took the offensive; in February, the Japanese abandoned the island and began their long retreat. Wheelan rightly concludes, “after squandering opportunities to land large numbers of reinforcements in August and September—when Japan enjoyed air and naval superiority—the Japanese attempted to make up for it in October and November. It was too late; by then American air and naval forces had become too formidable.”
Current-day readers, accustomed to an era of perpetual war with no end in sight, will find this expert, nuts-and-bolts history of a famous victory thoroughly satisfying.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-306-82459-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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 Yorkerstaff 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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