Serviceable but lackluster account.
An examination of what was indeed the greatest battle, numerically and perhaps otherwise, in history.
Nagorski (Last Stop Vienna, 2003, etc.), a former Newsweek Moscow bureau chief, draws on recently declassified Soviet archives to explore unknown aspects of the half-year-long battle for Russia’s capital over the fall and winter of 1941-42. One of them comes after the war, when Soviet commander Marshal Zhukov, now defense minister, requested an estimate of Soviet casualties; when he received it, he ordered its author, “Hide it and don’t show it to anybody!” And for good reason, as Nagorski shows: Overall Russian casualties in the battle were 1,896,500, against the Germans’ 615,000. Not that the Germans had it easy; convinced that Moscow would be taken before the winter came, Adolf Hitler failed to provide cold-weather gear for his men, thousands of whom died of frostbite and exposure. The news in Nagorski’s book isn’t much news at all: Neither Hitler nor his Soviet counterpart, Josef Stalin, shied from sacrificing soldiers for their respective totalitarian causes, so that the Armageddon-sized battle was all but inevitable. Still, this was something new: Soviet soldiers who had been captured and then liberated, for instance, were sent into battle in human-wave assaults, with almost zero chance of survival, while even the most loyal Soviet soldier often went into battle without a weapon, told to scavenge one from a dead German. Small wonder that the casualties were so heavy. Though he considers what might have happened had Hitler not split his forces into three fronts and instead gone straight for Moscow, Nagorski’s account lacks the big-picture clarity of other journalistic studies of the Russian war, such as Harrison Salisbury’s The 900 Days; the battle scenes are uninspired, too, as military-history buffs of the Cornelius Ryan school will quickly note.
Serviceable but lackluster account.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8110-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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