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LAST TO DIE

A DEFEATED EMPIRE, A FORGOTTEN MISSION, AND THE LAST AMERICAN KILLED IN WORLD WAR II

A worthy sortie that explores a curtain-closing moment in history that might have gone very badly indeed.

The surrender that almost wasn’t: an illuminating study of the last moments of World War II.

According to conventional histories, Japan lost no time in surrendering to the Allies after the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, writes Military History editor in chief Harding (The Last Battle: When U.S. and German Soldiers Joined Forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe, 2013), who seems to be making a specialty of the forgotten closing episodes of WWII, there was more than sporadic resistance. Despite Emperor Hirohito’s order for a cease-fire, numerous military units committed mutiny by continuing to fight—and it was one such unit that killed American Airman Anthony Marchione, just 20 years old. In a neat blend of military and technological history, Harding links Marchione’s story to the development of the aircraft he staffed, a lumbering target called the Consolidated Dominator, a “trouble-plagued super bomber” that barely took off before being scrapped—and whose very existence has been reduced, these days, to a few parts in private collections around the world. Harding also examines the episode surrounding Marchione’s death in its global-implications context: had Gen. Douglas MacArthur chosen to retaliate, he suggests, the war in Japan might have raged on, since the anti-surrender elements in the Japanese military could have argued that the Allies, too, had violated the cease-fire agreement. There are some dense technical passages that will please aircraft enthusiasts but that civilians might find daunting (“The design featured a shoulder-mounted high-lift/low-drag Davis wing with a span of 135 feet, twin end-plate fin and rudder assemblies, and eighty-three-foot-long cylindrical fuselage, tricycle landing gear, and dual ‘roll-up’ bomb bays”) and a few moments of semidigested, tangential information (“Italy in the early twentieth century was a land of widespread economic inequality”), but in the main, the narrative is well-executed.

A worthy sortie that explores a curtain-closing moment in history that might have gone very badly indeed.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-306-82338-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Da Capo

Review Posted Online: May 31, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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