Word: book
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...Sacco reminds us, for example, that the vast majority of Gazans are refugees driven out of their homes on Israel's coastal plain in the war of 1948, and barred from returning. And in one of the most startling observations in the book, he shows that Israeli leaders understood exactly why the Palestinians of Gaza would turn to violence. He quotes General Moshe Dayan, Israel's most celebrated military commander, at the April 1956 funeral of a kibbutznik slain by Palestinian fedayeen near the Gaza border, warning Israelis that they faced an intractable conflict that they had no choice...
...Marine Division, which was ambushed by snipers at Guam, or the intricacies of Operation Detachment at Iwo Jima. Print journalists like Robert Sherrod (on Tarawa) and Ted Nakashima (on U.S.-Japanese concentration camps) were eye-openers. "I went on a reading rampage," he recalls. "There is a fabulous book called The Fall of Japan. I got heavily into William Manchester and John Hersey." (See pictures of World War II re-enactors...
...past decade, Hanks has worked overtime to support the National World War II Museum in New Orleans - a pet project of the late historian Stephen Ambrose, on whose book Band of Brothers was based. On March 2, the museum, which will soon open a Pacific-theater wing, hosted a reception after a local screening of The Pacific, attended by the last wave of old-timers who consider V-J day a personal accomplishment. Wherever Hanks travels, veterans accost him with thank-yous. "It's pretty heady," Hanks says. "But now the Korean War guys have started coming...
...favorite book as a teen was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which he thought was far scarier than any Hitchcock psychodrama because it had actually happened to a particular family in Holcomb, Kans. "Capote's horror," Hanks says, "has stuck with me." Capote called his work a nonfiction novel - informed by reporting but drawing on the techniques of fiction for its dramatic power. It's a fair description of Hanks' productions, in which historical events and figures are drawn together along fictionalized story arcs, and characters have the psychological interiority of characters in novels...
...Kennedy assassination is the fire-breathing dragon of U.S. history, and Hanks seems singularly hubristic about grabbing its tail. Once, when I interviewed Gerald Ford at his home office in Rancho Mirage, Calif., for a book, the ex-President pulled me aside, pointing to that week's incoming correspondence. Mail about his role in the Warren Commission was three or four feet high compared with a measly inch pertaining to his White House tenure. But Hanks is perfectly aware of the beehive he is about to kick over. He seems to relish the prospect...