In World War II memories, Terkel has found a great, untold story—with fore-shadowings of Vietnam and aftershocks of atomic warfare. Terkel explains the title, matter-of-factly, as the Vietnam, nuclear-war contrast; the testimony—even from those whose lives peaked in WW II—exposes the irony of the phrase. First witness is "Hawaiian"-Californian John Garcia: in December 1941, as a pipefitter apprentice at Pearl Harbor, he retrieved live and dead bodies from the water and hulls; his girlfriend was killed by misfired American shells, he petitioned FDR to get into service, then was asked his race (great-grandparents?) and, as "Caucasian," separated from "the other Hawaiians"; on Okinawa, "I'd get up each day and start drinking. . . . They would show us movies. Japanese women didn't cry. They accepted the ashes stoically. I knew different. They went home and cried." In that same lead-off section appear the Nisei, uprooted and interned; a child-witness to, and a-participant in, the hysteria; an American-born Japanese, trapped in Japan on a visit. One of the last sections has to do with the Bomb. In an Indiana farm kitchen, Terkel talks with Bill Harney, radar operator on the plane that bombed Nagasaki. In a New York hotel lobby, he talks to Marnie Seymour who, with her husband, worked at Oak Ridge. "Out of the eighteen couples at the motel we lived in, most have never been able to have children. We are rather fortunate. We have four children. Two have birth defects." (Later, living in "very swish" New Canaan, she'd see the Hiroshima Maidens, brought over by Norman Cousins, at the supermarket.) There are several things to be said about Terkel, and his material. He has sought out people with real, unpredictable, history-brushing (sometimes history-revising) stories—but also persons whose experiences could be called typical, who become archetypal (like Chicago business executive Robert Ramos, "the skinny nineteen-year-old kid who's gonna prove that he can measure up"). He has a light intermix, too, of onlookers and leaders—yielding comments from both Pauline Kael and a retired admiral on the vacuousness of WW II films (but contrast, as well, between Kael's approval of The Clock and a war bride's contempt). He doesn't, however, construct his groupings mechanically, to make obvious points: blacks, for instance, turn up everywhere; under the rubric "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" we hear only from Marine Andrews; pronouncements on Vietnam differ, one after another Pacific veteran attests to gratitude for the Bomb. What is inescapable, though, is the recognition of war as brutal, and brutalizing; the reservations about "the Good War" utterable only in Vietnam-and-after retrospect.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1984
ISBN: 1565843436
Page Count: 612
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
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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