by Arnold R. Isaacs ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 30, 1997
Isaacs (Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia, 1983) covers a good deal of territory in this sober, strongly written, and persuasively argued book. According to the former Baltimore Sun foreign correspondent, the ``lingering legacies'' of the Vietnam War include a continuing impact on American veterans, on nonveterans of the Vietnam generation, and on American foreign and military policy, as well as the POW/MIA issue, Indochinese immigration to the US, US-Vietnam relations, and reconciliation efforts in this country. Examining those topics is a huge, complicated task, but Isaacs does so extremely capably. He amasses a large amount of solid information in each area, carefully analyzes it, and comes up with honest, insightful conclusions. In the chapter on veterans, for example, he serves up a mixture of previously published and original interviews, along with a catalog of factual data to back up his conclusions. These include a strong condemnation of Hollywood and the news media for consistently presenting stories of Americans perpetrating atrocities in Vietnam. That situation, he argues effectively, ``made a clichÇ of atrocities'' and unfairly portrayed veterans as ultraviolent misfits, causing many Americans for years to blame the veterans for the war. Elsewhere, Isaacs marshals a vast amount of evidence to buttress his contention that the widely held belief that Vietnam continues to hold American POWs is a myth. The majority of Americans still listed as missing in Vietnam, Isaacs says, were ``undoubtedly killed at the time they disappeared.'' It is ``virtually inconceivable that any [are] still alive,'' he says, nor will it ever ``be known exactly how or where'' they died. Those blunt conclusions are sure to be controversial, given opinion polls indicating that two-thirds of the public believes Vietnam continues to hold American prisoners. A valuable book that shows vividly how the Vietnam War continues to have a wide impact on American society.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1997
ISBN: 0-8018-5605-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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