A momentous and moving follow-up to On Hallowed Ground.
An honorable survey of Arlington National Cemetery’s subdivision for military personnel killed in the global war on terror.
Former National Geographic executive editor Poole (On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery, 2009) explores Section 60, in the southeast corner of the much-respected burial ground, which is now home to more than 900 deceased American soldiers. From this most active area of Arlington National, he reports the riveting and powerful stories of family members and comrades in heart-rending prose. They include Army Capt. Russell Rippetoe, who was the first fatality to be memorialized from Operation Iraqi Freedom; an eternally grateful heart transplant recipient who religiously visits the grave of her benefactor; a family robbed of a loved one’s final viewing due to catastrophic injuries from IEDs; and an inconsolable mother grieving her beloved son. Poole contrasts the palpable frustration and pain of parents burying a child who perished from fratricide or those captured or missing in action with the somber splendor of an Arlington funeral, noting that not all of Section 60’s space belongs to those fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan, with over half of the allotted space belonging to veterans who fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. As these older graves join with those of more youthful soldiers, the author admits that “they have changed the look and feel of the cemetery,” with one visitor dramatically comparing the area to a contemporary memorialization much “like the Vietnam Wall was for their generation.” Poole salutes these sobering profiles nobly, with pages of photographs, interviews and personal reflections bringing the human toll of war into vivid and sorrowful focus. The author, who admits to “wandering among the tombstones in Section 60 for several years,” imparts a great deal of heartfelt emotion and respect to his tribute of this hallowed ground, observing, “this postage stamp of earth represents something much larger.”
A momentous and moving follow-up to On Hallowed Ground.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-293-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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