A meaty, informative book for railroad buffs as well as students of military history.
A history of the impact of the railroad on warfare.
Transportation historian Wolmar (Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World, 2010, etc.) argues that, by moving large numbers of men and their supplies over long distances at a speed previously unimaginable, railroads made war possible on an industrial scale. Their dominance began roughly with the Crimean War in 1850 and came to an end in the Korean War, just over a century later. The author notes that the era was marked by clashes between the generals and the railway men, each convinced that they knew the right way to put the new tool to use. Officers in all wars liked to commandeer empty cars after their arrival at the front, using them for everything from storage to headquarters. Meanwhile, railway companies disliked turning over their rolling stock to the war effort, fully aware that it might not come back. Engineer Herman Haupt, who supervised the Union railway program in the Civil War, devised solutions that maximized the delivery of men and supplies to the front, as well as tools for destroying enemy rail lines. Future military leaders who ignored Haupt’s principles did so at their peril, as Wolmar shows with examples running from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to World War II. In particular, the lesson that the railways give the advantage to a defender was missed by the generals of World War I, leading to bloodbaths like Passchendaele and Verdun. A little-known detail is the wide use of miniature trains to supply the trenches, a technique adopted by both sides on the Western Front. Wolmar also provides perspective on topics from the effective use of railways in the British colonial wars to the prolongation of the Korean War by the North Koreans’ skill at keeping their trains running despite constant American bombing. The author spices the narrative with odd sidelights such as the Russians’ predilection for armored trains or Hitler’s fascination with rail-mounted giant artillery pieces.
A meaty, informative book for railroad buffs as well as students of military history.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58648-971-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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
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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