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 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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