Useful to students of the last months of the Pacific War, though less so than Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s Kamikaze Diaries (2006)...
Elaborate study of one of the final naval battles of World War II, focusing on both Japanese and American participants.
Commissioned in 1943, the Essex Class aircraft carrier Bunker Hill sailed across the Pacific in the campaigns that reclaimed numerous islands from the Japanese, at tremendous cost. On May 11, 1945, the ship was hit by a kamikaze assault and suffered more than 700 casualties. Kennedy (Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, 1998) describes that attack and its aftermath in scarifying detail that is not for the squeamish. He writes of pilots trapped below deck and incinerated, “tangled together in a terrible knot worse than any nightmarish image by Hieronymus Bosch,” and of the young Japanese pilots who caused that damage, one of whose hand, detached from the body, “somehow maintained its shape, like a delicate glove, crushed.” Kennedy writes well, if gruesomely, of the lives of the fighters on both sides, and particularly of kamikaze flyer Kiyoshi Ogawa, 23 years old when he piloted his plane onto Bunker Hill’s deck. But the author sometimes writes to puzzling effect. He suggests at the outset that Americans who lived on the West Coast saw the war in the Pacific coming in advance and that America had no expansionist designs in Asia; he sidesteps the considerable historical discussion on the debate over invading Japan versus dropping the atomic bomb; and he lingers on the supposedly Caucasian physical characteristics of Ogawa and the Okinawans without quite explaining his fascination. He is also content to qualify matters that other historians would have nailed down, as when he writes, “The Bunker Hill did not sink, but she was knocked permanently out of the war. She probably never launched another aircraft.” Probably? It is the historian’s business to answer such questions.
Useful to students of the last months of the Pacific War, though less so than Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s Kamikaze Diaries (2006) and David Sears’s At War with the Wind: The Epic Struggle with Japan’s World War II Suicide Bombers (2008).Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-6080-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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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