The subtitle is a stretch, but the densely plotted narrative is sure to please military aficionados.
British novelist (Silesian Station, 2008, etc.) and military historian Downing focuses on three decisive weeks in 1941—from Nov. 17 to Dec. 8—leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The author intertwines the stories of three risky military maneuvers on the part of the Germans and the Japanese that would ultimately “seal the fate” of the aggressors—though it would take four more years for the Allies to achieve victory. Germany’s Operation Barbarossa invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 in a spectacular display of might, but by November was scuttled by cold weather, Russian resistance, lack of supplies and sinking morale. In North Africa, General Erwin Rommel and his Panzers were beating back incursions by British forces, though badly needed German munitions were being siphoned off to the Eastern Front. Because of Barbarossa, the earlier German successes in Libya, Greece and Crete were weakened, keeping them from adequately disrupting the British supply routes in Malta and around the Suez Canal. In the Pacific, the Japanese air fleet was well on its way toward a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor at the same time that American and Japanese diplomats were wrangling over initiatives on the Japanese war in China. Although the Americans had cracked the Japanese diplomatic code and knew vaguely of Japanese military intentions, Secretary of State Cordell Hull was stalling for time, since the U.S. armed forces needed a few more months to prepare for war. Adeptly juxtaposing Japanese vainglory—Japan did not possess the might or resources to win a war against the Allies—with American bungling, Downing offers a dark, captivating hindsight analysis with plenty of action.
The subtitle is a stretch, but the densely plotted narrative is sure to please military aficionados.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-306-81620-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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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