Haunting stories of hell on earth, but more celebrative and admiring than analytical. (15 b&w photos and 2 maps, not...
From the author of an oral history of POWs in WWII (We Were Each Other’s Prisoners, 1997), a similar volume about American soldiers who endured and survived captivity in Korea, only to return to an unforgiving country obsessed with Communism and its sympathizers.
Carlson interviewed about 50 former prisoners for this informative and moving account of men who a half-century ago raised their hands in surrender and thereby began a nightmarish existence in the hands of their enemies followed by 50 years of opprobrium from the media and an uninformed public. Neither the author nor his subjects can fathom why Korean War POWs have had to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous accusations, the most serious declaring that they cooperated with the enemy at a rate far beyond that of WWII’s “greatest generation.” Carlson dismisses this assertion, blaming its spread on the media, particularly Hollywood and particularly John Frankenheimer’s artistic but misleading film The Manchurian Candidate, which helped popularize the concept of “brainwashing.” Carlson’s narrative begins early in the war with the harrowing story of the Tiger Death March, a 9-day, 100-mile forced march in late October 1950 during which nearly two-thirds of the 845 prisoners died; stragglers were shot, as were the sick and the uncooperative. Carlson chronicles mass murder, torture, unspeakable sanitary and medical conditions. (“To be sent to the camp hospital,” he writes, “was tantamount to a death sentence.”) In general, he lets the veterans speak for themselves, a decision that has mixed results. It is certainly engaging to hear these men defend their actions, but such testimony should be the beginning of historical research, not the end. The result is an incomplete story no less biased than the egregious brainwashing films and news stories the vets justly abhor.
Haunting stories of hell on earth, but more celebrative and admiring than analytical. (15 b&w photos and 2 maps, not seen)Pub Date: April 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28684-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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