Successful niche military history for a popular audience.
Fireworks in Nazi-occupied Italy during the final year of World War II.
Prolific filmmaker and historian Lewis has written many accounts of commando derring-do across various historical eras. His current effort begins in the fall of 1944, one year into the Italian campaign. After months of slow, bitter advance up the peninsula, the Allies were stalled at the Gothic line, a heavily fortified position north of Florence. On the bright side, resistance forces in North Italy were perhaps the most effective in Europe. Fortified by air drops of supplies, arms, and members of Britain’s elite Special Air Service, they became a major thorn in the side of the German occupation. Lewis builds his story around Roy Farran and Michael Lees, two veteran British officers, describing their dramatic, if not always successful exploits in the years before they came together for Operation Tombola. Ordinarily resistance units confined themselves to acts of sabotage and ambush, but on this occasion, they received approval to target a corps headquarters housed in two well-defended villas. Lewis delivers his usual vivid account of the planning and fierce March 1945 attack, which included 50 British soldiers dropped in for the occasion and several hundred partisans including a company of Russian escaped POWs. It was largely successful, destroying the villas and causing substantial German casualties at the expense of two British dead. The operation has been called “possibly the most significant single action involving partisans in the entire history of the partisan movement.” Readers may wince at some of the author’s purple novelization in which historical characters talk, think, and reveal their emotions, but they will forgive him because he has turned up a little-known behind-the-lines spectacular led by two heroic British officers.
Successful niche military history for a popular audience.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8065-4074-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD
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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