No revisionist but a solid storyteller and naval scholar, Symonds mixes politics, strategy, sea battle fireworks, technical...
A veteran maritime historian delivers a satisfying one-volume history of “the impact of sea services from all nations on the overall trajectory and even the outcome” of World War II.
The massive naval campaigns of 1939 to 1945 remain the largest in history and will probably never happen again. Though there have been hundreds of books about this subject, readers will welcome this fine account from a highly qualified guide. Symonds (Maritime History/U.S. Naval War Coll.; Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings, 2014, etc.) emphasizes that because no navy was fully prepared for war in 1939, everyone got it wrong. Neither Hitler nor his naval chief gave priority to submarines, so Germany began the war with too few and never caught up. Despite many horrendous sinkings, ably described by the author, 99 percent of Allied ships reached their destinations. Many historians now agree that U-boats never came close to cutting off supplies to Britain. The far more successful American submarine campaign wreaked havoc on Japan’s merchant fleet, bringing the country close to starvation in 1945. It’s a cliché but also true that most pre–WWII naval planners failed to realize that air power made their first love, battleships, obsolete. A minority of Japanese admirals understood, and the two-year delay before America’s entry into the war allowed American officials to realize what they needed. Rocking no boats, Symonds agrees that the Allied victory resulted from British stubbornness at the beginning, followed by Russian blood and American industrial production. He adds that brains, luck, and enemy stupidity remained essential, enabling America to turn the tide against Japan in 1942 at Midway and Guadalcanal with inferior forces.
No revisionist but a solid storyteller and naval scholar, Symonds mixes politics, strategy, sea battle fireworks, technical details, and personal anecdotes to deliver one of the better single-volume histories of the naval portion of WWII.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-024367-8
Page Count: 792
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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