One of the best recent books on a war that ended half a century ago but that still reverberates.
A searching look at the devastation wrought by America’s war in Vietnam and efforts by veterans to help undo it.
“By the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the politburo of the Vietnamese Communist Party had designated tourism a ‘spearhead industry,’ and Vietnam was welcoming close to 18 million foreign visitors a year,” writes journalist Black. The tourist attractions did not include the generations of Vietnamese born with horrific birth defects attributable to Agent Orange or missing limbs thanks to unexploded bombs and shells. Enter two Americans who had served in the field during the awful year of 1968. Having wrestled with guilt and PTSD for years after their service, they decided to return to Vietnam and launch efforts to locate and remove unexploded ordnance and remediate rural areas poisoned by chemicals. That program was initiated, Black reveals, under the Kennedy administration, before Vietnam became a full-throated American war. An ironic surprise is that Kurt Vonnegut’s brother designed a technique to flood trails used by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong so that they would become sticky masses of mud, clear inspiration for the Ice-Nine of Cat’s Cradle. Black sets much of this vivid narrative on the ground, painstakingly documenting the death-dealing technology America deployed against an enemy—and a civilian populace—that was vastly outgunned but bent on victory. The combat scenes are appropriately scarifying, and a key moment comes when one of the veterans returns with Black to the site of an ambush that killed many men in his unit. Just as effective is the author’s account of the politics of international aid and the people who joined, with the two veterans, in their expiatory efforts: Quaker volunteers, epidemiologists and medical researchers, Vietnamese officials, and, most importantly, other veterans seeking redemption and resolution.
One of the best recent books on a war that ended half a century ago but that still reverberates.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780593534106
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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