A splendid first-person account of the costly campaign that enabled Allied forces to wrest Guadalcanal from the Japanese in WW II's Pacific theater. Twining (who retired from the USMC as a four-star general in 1959) was operations officer of the 1st Marine Division during its prolonged struggle to gain control of ``the Canal,'' and he draws on his experiences to provide a vivid narrative that starts with a lucid appreciation of amphibious-warfare doctrine. Getting down to cases, he ruefully recalls his role as an advance man in New Zealand, which the US military used as a staging area. The author goes on to detail how the leathernecks mounted a picture-perfect landing near Lunga Point on August 7, 1942, and moved quickly inland to capture an almost completed airfield. To this day Twining remains outraged by the subsequent withdrawal of capital as well as supply vessels by ultracautious naval commanders unwilling to put them at risk; momentarily left in the lurch, marines ashore began referring to themselves as the 1st Maroon Division. Fighter planes and bombers began arriving to take up some of the slack, however, and William (Bull) Halsey replaced an appreciably less aggressive admiral in mid-October. In the meantime, Tokyo had dispatched thousands of reinforcements to Guadalcanal. Though outgunned and outmanned on the ground, the embattled marines maintained the initiative, annihilating their foes in fierce clashes throughout the island's fetid jungles and along its rugged waterways. Twining has high praise for the Marine Corps officers and men who endured savage combat, short rations, drenching rains, and an enervating climate on Guadalcanal. The book closes with an evaluation of the tactical lessons learned on Guadalcanal and their significance in the context of America's strategic policies (or lack thereof) in a perdurably dangerous world. An estimable addition to the literature of Guadalcanal. (30 b&w photos and maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-89141-549-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Presidio/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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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