A worthwhile, impressively researched history of the women correspondents who chronicled WWII. Sorel (co-author, with Edward Sorel, of First Encounters: Meetings with Memorable People, 1994) tells the trail-blazing stories of some two dozen women journalists who covered US military operations during WWII. Although these women faced the same dangerous conditions as their male counterparts, they also confronted the military’s patronizing attitudes about women. In one memorable wartime example, General George Patton delivered an expletive-laden lecture to his staff officers, interspersing his tirade with sheepish apologies to the “lady” reporters in the back. Much of the book describes the resourcefulness of these women in circumventing the military’s endless restrictions. Marguerite Higgins bent the rules to become the first reporter to detail the sickening horrors of Dachau, arriving at the camp within minutes of its liberation. “Dickey” Chapelle covered the carnage on Iwo Jima, getting shot at by the enemy and reprimanded by the US military. Martha Gellhorn had an especially rocky war, covering events in Europe and Asia with her philandering husband, Ernest Hemingway. Despite the risks, these woman forced their way to the front lines. Catherine Coyne’s account of being at ground zero while Nazi bombers attacked a bridge is simply unforgettable. Janet Flanner, the famous “Genàt” of the New Yorker, brilliantly depicts the liberation of Paris. Sorel has a gargantuan task in attempting to capture the experiences of so many different women in so many different places, from North Africa to China to Normandy. At moments, her wide-ranging narrative suffers from a lack of depth. The famously tempestuous relationship between Gellhorn and Hemingway, for example, is described only briefly, as is Lee Miller’s friendship with Pablo Picasso. Any one of these fearless women could be the subject of an entire book. An ambitious and entertaining examination of a neglected side of American military history: the war within a war waged by women journalists. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55970-493-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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
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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