A surprisingly absorbing legal procedural.
The Doolittle raid over Tokyo four months after Pearl Harbor has received plenty of attention, but this captivating account of the lesser-known aftermath deserves attention.
A lawyer specializing in war crimes law, Paradis ably summarizes the mission in which B-25 bombers inflicted little physical but much psychological damage to the Japanese. Of the 80 American airmen who participated, two died in crashes and eight were captured. The Japanese executed three for “bombing and strafing school areas”; five were pardoned by a “merciful” emperor but sentenced to life imprisonment with “special treatment.” The result was more than four years of brutality. One airman died of malnutrition before liberation, and one was close to death and never entirely recovered. Once the news got out, Americans demanded vengeance, the survivors most of all. Most of the book describes efforts of a team of American lawyers to track down those responsible, gather evidence, and try them for their crimes. Had the U.S. followed Japan’s lead, officials would have swept up everyone involved, performed a cursory show trial, and extracted our revenge. It is to America’s credit that it stuck to democratic ideals. The lawyers worked hard to assemble convincing evidence on each individual involved and then persuade relatively impartial judges who were also listening to an aggressive defense. Although a legal scholar, Paradis writes engagingly, delivering clear explanations of the legal issues, the onerous preparations, and the trial itself. Four defendants, all Japanese army officers, faced five American judges who were Army officers and not lawyers. The lawyers for the accused, who were not chosen for their experience, worked hard for their clients. The relatively mild verdicts that resulted—three received “five years at hard labor,” and the other received eight—incensed their superiors. However, the author, who demonstrates a clear grasp of the legal matters at play, feels that the defense presented a reasonable case.
A surprisingly absorbing legal procedural.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0471-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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 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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