A worthy tribute honoring each member of a small group of volunteers who responded to the call of duty.
Inspiring story of the Army’s 2nd Ranger Battalion, Company D (“Dog Company”), from battle historian O'Donnell (Give Me Tomorrow: The Korean War's Greatest Untold Story—The Epic Stand of the Marines of George Company, 2010, etc.).
The 200-plus volunteers who made up the initial complement of Dog Company assembled at Fort Meade in March 1943. The author has worked with veterans of the unit—e.g., the late Len Lomell and other “great Ranger friends”—to trace survivors and organize their stories and memories into the Drop Zone Oral History Project, which provides one of the sources for this book. The soldiers were trained to assault and capture high points from the sea, and the cliffs and heavy gun emplacements at Pointe du Hoc were their target from the beginning. The assignment was considered to be “a suicide mission,” and top officials “projected casualties would top 70 percent.” O'Donnell engagingly describes how a dedicated team was built out of the specialist training it received, but he is at his best presenting the fortunes and shocks of battle as the months of planning and training were blown away in a series of mischances that also fortuitously safeguarded the unit from delayed pre-invasion bombing runs. The author also highlights the courage of Ranger Lt. Bob Edlin and his three companions, who organized “the unbelievably audacious bluff” that secured the surrender of the German garrison of the Lochrist Gun Battery at Brest in August 1944.
A worthy tribute honoring each member of a small group of volunteers who responded to the call of duty.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-306-82029-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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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