An exciting, elegantly rendered overview, simultaneously narrating the grandiose theories and the smaller human dramas of...
A comprehensive examination of naval warfare’s rapid and decisive transformations.
Spector (After Tet, 1992), a Marine veteran of Vietnam, demonstrates both academic fervor and hard-won passion. He begins with an intimate account of Tsushima, the climactic 1905 encounter between Japanese and Russian fleets that promoted the “all-dreadnought” navy and spawned an arms race among European powers to construct these enormous, heavily armored battleships. Yet, paradoxically, large-scale encounters between dreadnought fleets were rare in WWI, as German forces pursued “unrestricted” submarine warfare. Early conflicts in WWII contradicted previous theories, as when British defenders in Crete suffered heavy ship losses from Nazi dive-bombing tactics. The Pacific battles of 1942 confirmed the primacy of carriers over battleships: At Midway and Santa Cruz, American and Japanese fortunes shifted frequently, at horrific cost, demonstrating that “it was not technical but human problems that were most critical.” Simultaneously, the Battle of the Atlantic confirmed that U-boat warfare could be countered by aggressive convoy actions, which gave Nazi submariners the war’s highest casualty rates. While much of Spector’s commentary concerns intricate strategic matters, he wisely relies on dramatic eyewitness accounts, as when an Enterprise crewmember recalls a “dive bomber coming right at our guns. He released his bomb and it had my name on it flashing like a neon light.” Chapters such as “My Grave Shall Be the Sea” explore bizarre naval traditions, epitomized by such harsh oddities as the Japanese Kamikaze corps (for whose shabbily treated teenagers landing lessons were deemed unnecessary). Later chapters primarily address the American navy’s difficulty in adapting to Cold War scenarios, as in the maligned river-warfare campaigns of Vietnam.
An exciting, elegantly rendered overview, simultaneously narrating the grandiose theories and the smaller human dramas of men who fought under absurdly difficult conditions.Pub Date: May 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-86085-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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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