A little-known set of moving adventures, well-researched and -presented.
A son learns late in life about his bomber pilot father’s secretive, crucial role in saving POWs amid the mayhem of the last months of World War II.
Scientific writer Trimble learned the full story behind his father Robert’s flying missions at the end of World War II only in the last years of his father’s long life (he died in 2009 at age 90). However, the author always knew that his father, a captain and “regular guy” from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, courageously flew 35 raids over Germany and France in 1944 while an officer based in England. Yet there was more: Just before he flew his last B-17 mission in December 1944 and was handed a “Lucky Bastard” certificate to head home and see his wife and new baby girl, he was apprised of a new tour planned for him, supposedly “out of the combat zone.” As the Russians pushed back the front line, liberating German concentration camps, POWs were set loose amid the chaos, often harassed and worse by the Russians. Capt. Trimble, given an Office of Strategic Services passport and with little idea that he was actually going to work largely as a spy, flew into Poltava Air Base, Ukraine, headquarters of U.S. Eastern Command, which was once a Luftwaffe launch point but now served as a stopover base for Allied long-range bombing missions. During the next few tense months, under the resentful scrutiny of the Soviets, Trimble had to seek out American POWs, stranded flight crews and others he took pity on (a group of 400 deserted Frenchwomen), feed and shelter them, and arrange for their safe transport to Odessa and elsewhere. The enemy became the obstructionist Russians, who did not want the Americans snooping in their backyard. Ultimately, the American captain returned home shaken and traumatized from what he had witnessed.
A little-known set of moving adventures, well-researched and -presented.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-425-27604-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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