A complex and worthy story reduced to a beach read.
The Ford Motor Company goes to war.
In this latest examination of the transition of American industry to wartime production, journalist Baime (Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans, 2009, etc.) focuses on Ford’s conversion from the production of automobiles to aircraft engines and the B-24 Liberator bomber. The author surveys the history of the company from its founding in the Model T era to the outbreak of war, portraying Henry Ford as an anti-Semitic curmudgeon who instituted a reign of terror on the factory floor under the fearsome Harry Bennett. His long-suffering son Edsel, installed as a figurehead president, struggled against him to get the company involved in war production and drove the creation of the massive Willow Run plant, with its goal of a bomber per hour, until his early death from cancer. A pasteboard FDR puts in an occasional appearance as the ebullient father of the nation urging everyone on to victory. Baime structures the story as a lurid family contest among three generations of Fords, but he never develops the personalities of Edsel and his son Henry II (as he calls him) with sufficient depth or nuance to make the conflict genuinely engaging in either business or personal terms. He brushes briskly past the details of the truly epic challenges of retooling the auto plants and fine-tuning Willow Run; potential embarrassments, like labor strife and the relationship of the company with Ford affiliates in occupied Europe building trucks for the Nazis, surface dramatically, then fade rapidly out of the narrative. Written in a hyperbolic tabloid style—e.g., 40 torpedo bombers constitute "a vast storm cloud of airplanes," Edsel Ford "had been all but crucified”—the book falls well short of the standards set by similar recent works. See Arthur Herman’s Freedom’s Forge instead.
A complex and worthy story reduced to a beach read.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-547-71928-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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