An uneven war story that will appeal to aficionados of the Pacific theater and wartime espionage.
Bringing to light a little-known facet of the Pacific theater in World War II.
Veteran foreign correspondent Eisner (The Pope's Last Crusade: How an American Jesuit Helped Pope Pius XI's Campaign to Stop Hitler, 2013, etc.) tracks three complicated stories of Allied heroics that took place when the Japanese attacked and invaded the Philippines just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese overran the American-held archipelago, driving the Americans to the Bataan peninsula and to the fortress of Corregidor before eventually forcing Gen. Douglas MacArthur to flee to Australia with his family and staff in March 1942 and the rest of the Americans and Filipinos to surrender ignominiously in April. Moving chronologically, Eisner alternates among the characters while concentrating on the actions of an enigmatic American woman from Michigan, born Claire Phillips, who had so many aliases and secrets after she left home as a teenager that it was hard for the biographer to ascertain the truth. Nonetheless, after three marriages, she wound up in Manila, braving the Japanese occupation with a foster child. After wooing a younger American soldier, with whom she went to Bataan, she eventually opened a nightclub for the Japanese officers in Manila, the Tsubaki Club, in order to finance her covert activities to aid the American POWs. Meanwhile, above the hills of Bataan, John Boone, a 29-year-old colonel, had lost contact with his army after the Japanese invasion and, recognizing the desperation of the surrender, began to organize a guerrilla army made up of other stragglers and deserters, supported materially by Phillips, known as “High Pockets,” and others. Eisner’s third link is slippery U.S.–born Navy reserve officer Charles “Chick” Parsons, who, masquerading as a Spanish- and Tagalog-speaking businessman, was able to relay supplies and information to the guerrillas. Though the individual stories are gripping, the writing is workmanlike and Eisner struggles to organize these detailed threads into a cohesive narrative.
An uneven war story that will appeal to aficionados of the Pacific theater and wartime espionage.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-42965-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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