George Company’s performance at Chosin Reservoir practically defines heroism. O’Donnell brings it to vivid life.
Military historian O’Donnell (They Dared Return: The True Story of Jewish Spies Behind the Lines in Nazi Germany, 2009, etc.) chronicles a Marine company’s struggles in the toughest campaign of the Korean War.
George Company was thrown together from raw recruits and World War II veterans in the wake of North Korea’s invasion of the south in 1950. When they went ashore at Inchon, most of the men had never seen combat and some barely knew how to handle their weapons. But their arrival tipped the balance, beginning an offensive that drove the North Koreans nearly to the Chinese border by late October—at which point the Chinese army came into the conflict. That invasion set up George Company’s defining moment. Surrounded by overwhelming numbers near the Chosin Reservoir, the company held out with nearly inhuman determination to protect a vital intersection and haven for other cut-off units. Gen. Oliver Smith’s response, when asked if his men would retreat, showed the Marines’ resolve: “Retreat, Hell; we’re just advancing in another direction.” Drawing on interviews with the surviving members of George Company, O’Donnell graphically details the rigors of battle in the brutal Korean winter. First Sgt. Rocco Zullo, a prototypically tough Marine who’d seen action in the Pacific during WWII, is in many ways the hero of the story. He drove his green recruits to remarkable feats of valor until he was wounded in late 1950. His men believed him dead until he showed up at a reunion decades later. While he does not underplay the horrors of the war, and does justice to the lighter moments that men remember years later, the author shines when he captures such catch-in-the-throat moments as when the Fifth and Seventh Marines, coming into base after a harried withdrawal under intense Chinese pressure, marched in singing the Marine Hymn. A final withdrawal, which included crossing a deep chasm on an air-dropped bridge, brought the soldiers to temporary safety, though its members saw more action throughout the war.
George Company’s performance at Chosin Reservoir practically defines heroism. O’Donnell brings it to vivid life.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-306-81801-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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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