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BLOOD AND FEARS

HOW AMERICA'S BOMBER BOYS OF THE 8TH AIR FORCE SAVED WORLD WAR II

An intimate, often affecting look back at a group of young men who established an American air superiority that persists to...

In his first book, a British journalist tells the story of the airmen who reduced the Third Reich to ashes.

On the 8th Air Force’s dangerous missions, which consisted of persistent daytime bombing of the European continent, 26,000 flyers would die. Targeting airfields, transportation centers, industrial sites, and refineries, the 8th alone dropped 714,000 tons of bombs on Europe between April 1942 and 1945 and, together with the Royal Air Force, killed 593,000 civilians in the bomber offensive. Relying heavily on diaries, letters, journals, and interviews, Wilson tracks the air campaign from the months before D-Day to the fall of Berlin. Chronicling numerous significant raids, his account abounds with arresting detail—the widespread heavy use of Benzedrine to fight tiredness, the frustrating performance of the electric suits designed to keep flyers warm at 28,000 feet—and features broader discussions about air combat—e.g., the role of sheer luck in determining who lived or died and the shockingly high risk of collision. Famous names pop up: European commander Carl Spaatz and, of course, the 8th’s fabled Gen. Jimmy Doolittle. Wilson also touches on the midair explosion that killed young Joe Kennedy, the heroics of Hollywood star Jimmy Stewart, the first “kill” of future legend Chuck Yeager, and the mysterious, deadly plane crash of band leader Maj. Glenn Miller. Mostly, though, Wilson focuses on the everyday pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and gunners, their exploits in the air, and their lives in Britain, a nation whose social life their presence transformed. The American flyboys—“over paid, oversexed, and over here”—married 41,000 British girls, fathering 14,000 babies. Even as their planes regularly fell out of the sky, scarring the countryside and cities, the airmen busied themselves with small cultural revolutions—e.g., introducing swing music to teenagers and peanut butter to schoolboys.

An intimate, often affecting look back at a group of young men who established an American air superiority that persists to this day.

Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-68177-319-3

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Pegasus

Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Readers Vote
  • 67


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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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