A tender, loving account of a short but honorable life.
Walker collects the letters his uncle sent home from Europe while serving in World War II.
In 1924, Fletcher “Bud” Blanton was born in Horry County, South Carolina, and grew up accustomed to back-breaking work on a tobacco farm. In 1944, he was drafted into the United States Army as war engulfed Europe. He became a member of Company D, 413th Infantry, which was part of the 104th Infantry Division, informally known as the Timberwolves. He would serve on the battlefields of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. During the Battle of the Bulge, a little over two months into his deployment, he was killed; apparently, he was hit by a mortar shell while on guard duty. In 2022, the author, Bud’s nephew, stumbled upon a packet of letters Blanton sent home (including photographs) with a note from Walker’s long-dead father imploring him not to discard the contents. The author dutifully complied and found a wealth of information that brought clarity to his uncle’s short and somewhat inscrutable life. The discovery was one of great historical and emotional value, a point movingly observed by Walker: “Now, in my seventh decade, with far fewer years ahead than behind me, my uncle’s letters provided the most poignant reminder of service to country I had ever known, the letters from the one soldier whose wartime experience is an inseparable part of my own heritage.”
The author, who served as a reporter and editor for Stars and Stripes for more than 30 years, uses the letters as a springboard to craft a more comprehensive historical account, which includes the experiences of Bud’s family both before and after his death. He also furnishes brief biographical vignettes of several of the men who also served in the Timberwolves, astutely sketching a portrait of the common soldier. The letters themselves are the highlight of the book; Bud was a naturally “jolly” person, and a touch wild, too, but his experience of war, as short as his time overseas was, matured him profoundly. One letter he dispatched after being sent to the front makes this point affectingly: “I am about to realize what the war is all about,” he writes; “I often think about how lucky some of the people back home are an about how foolish I used to do when I was back home.” Walker captures not only Bud’s deepening character, but also his terrible loneliness away from home—he often pleaded with his seven brothers and sisters to write to him, and he would send as many as three letters a day to his girlfriend, Dot Floyd, back in the United States. The author’s speculations regarding what Bud’s life might have been like had he survived are heartbreaking—all of his options were waylaid by “those unpredictable characters called love and luck and fate.” This is a touching homage to a soldier who made the ultimate sacrifice for his country.
A tender, loving account of a short but honorable life.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781643365022
Page Count: 224
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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