The best-selling author of Without Remorse (1993) and the nonfiction Submarine (1993) examines the past, present, and future of America’s largest warships. Clancy offers an insider’s look at the key capital ship in the American naval forces, the aircraft carrier, and the various “systems” (that’s Clancy-speak for weapons, especially aircraft and missles) aboard them. Clancy offers an alphabet soup of military acronyms but overall manages to give a thorough look at exactly what the role of the carrier is in a navy that no longer faces a major blue-water threat, as it did when the carrier was developed to take on the Japanese and then the Soviets. Clancy focuses on the new role of the carrier as an offensive platform to launch strikes, as it did in the Gulf war and continues to do in Bosnia. Clancy, always the consumate navy booster, looks at the manner in which the hugely expensive carriers have been negelected during times of peace, only to be returned to their place of importance when international events heated up. Lumped in with the carrier is a history of the development and mission of naval aviation, which makes for far more fascinating reading than the history of their floating airfields. Clancy’s conversations with naval personal, especially the chief of naval operations, Admiral Jay Johnson, are wooden, as if they were conducted by fax rather than in person. The concluding chapter, in which Clancy casts his imagination forward 20 years to the role US carriers might play in a nuclear conflict between India and Afghanistan, is worth the price of admission; though too brief, for drama it ranks with the scenarios he creates in his novels. Clancy’s loyal followers, especially those in the military, are sure to love this rich look at our nation’s most expensive floating hardware, but they will need to cut through Clancy’s sabre-rattling along the way.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-425-16682-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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