An exciting military chronicle packed with well-documented, intimate portraits of a group of brave pilots.
Another look at the diverse collection of pilots who fought for Israeli independence, underscoring Nancy Spielberg’s recent documentary, Above and Beyond, among other accounts.
In his engaging new book, military and aviation historian Gandt (The President’s Pilot, 2014, etc.) reveals the significant contributions of American and Canadian airmen in defending the nascent Israeli state against attacks by its Arab neighbors shortly after the nation’s 1948 independence. A gifted storyteller, the author begins his chronicle with the trepidation of David Ben-Gurion, then president of the Jewish Agency Executive, on the eve of Israeli independence. He knew that the wild jubilation of a U.N. vote for partition of Palestine in November 1947 would soon be followed by war once the British withdrew in May and that the surrounding five Arab countries would “roll like a seismic wave across Israel.” Gandt tells the astounding tale of how a handful of committed people, led by Al Schwimmer, an American World War II veteran and flight engineer for TWA, managed to convince the leaders of the Haganah—Israel’s fledgling defense arm—that building an air force was the only way to win a war against the Arabs. In a few short months, Schwimmer and other veteran pilots, many of whom were Jewish, worked under official U.S. radar to secure war-surplus airplanes—nonglamorous but sturdy transport aircraft like the C-46 Curtiss Commando, DC-3 and C-46, as well as the Lockheed Constellation, and even Messerschmitts from Czechoslovakia—because of U.S. restrictions imposed by the Neutrality Act of 1939. After creating a Panamanian front company, reconditioning the planes, and doing some quick training in Czechoslovakia, the fledgling, newly named Israeli Air Force was enlisted to counter Egyptian spitfires almost immediately upon Israeli independence. Over the next few months, they performed a series of military miracles, all of which Gandt delineates with aplomb.
An exciting military chronicle packed with well-documented, intimate portraits of a group of brave pilots.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-25477-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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