An educational account of an American pilot’s experiences.
A biography of World War II fighter pilot Donn Deisenroth, written by his daughter.
Kay offers a nonfiction work about her father’s life before, during, and after World War II, in which he fought as a pilot in North Africa and Italy. It draws extensively from his personal “War Log,” as well as “newspaper clippings, books, flight training ‘yearbooks,’ and photographs,” which were discovered only after both of her parents were deceased. The resulting account puts readers right into the chaos of a war in which communication was relatively primitive and short bursts of aerial dogfights were followed by long stretches of restless boredom in the North African heat. There were some scary moments: “When I landed the other day my nose wheel fell off,” Deisenroth recounts in a 1943 letter; later, he wrote that he went on a “dive-bombing mission…and got jumped by eight ME109s. Have never been so scared in all my life.” While flying into Italy later that year, Deisenroth nearly died in an aerial attack: “They shot my ship to ribbons.” He was captured first by Italian soldiers, escaped, and then was captured by German soldiers. As a prisoner of war for nearly 19 months in a prison camp in Barth, Germany, he bunked in a room with up to 19 other American officers; they tried and failed to create an escape tunnel and were eventually released after the surrender of the Axis powers. Some of the book’s most engaging moments lie in Kay’s research, which contextualizes her late father’s journals and letters about his experiences with informative footnotes such as “Approximately half of all of the US military pilots who fought in WWII received their initial flight training in Stearman PT-13 Kaydet biplanes.” She also provides revealing details of social mores of early 1940s America, as when Kay’s mother, Norma, “was invited to play the violin in the Sacramento Symphony Orchestra…but she turned down that job offer so she could marry Donn.”
An educational account of an American pilot’s experiences.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9717905-2-0
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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