Students of French and World War II history will enjoy and learn from this well-written book.
The plight of ordinary Parisians during World War II.
With access to the diaries of everyday citizens who lived through the Nazi occupation of Paris, Drake assembles a valuable picture of “personal history, remembered conversations, the minutiae of routine, fragments of memory.” Everyone knew the war was coming; it was just a matter of when. By early September 1939, France had civil defense bolstered, men mobilized, and art treasures moved to safety. After the invasion of Poland, France and England declared war on Germany and thus began the “funny sort of war.” The Polish intrusion was a reason to declare war, but the Allies sat back and waited for Hitler to attack them, thereby giving him plenty of time to complete the destruction of Poland. It was not until May 1940 that Hitler, after pushing the British and French to Dunkirk, broke through the Ardennes and caught the French completely by surprise. By June 22, the French had capitulated, and Germany proceeded to dismember her. France was divided into two zones: the occupied zone under German control and the “free zone” led by World War I hero Philippe Pétain and the widely loathed Pierre Laval. Presenting the story chronologically, Drake creates an easily comprehensible, even exciting, narrative. The author vividly portrays the desperation of searching for food, fuel, and clothing, along with the dangers of arrest and false accusations. During the “phony war,” almost 500,000 people left Paris—those with money, a place to go, and the means to get there—only to return to rationing and severe restrictions. The passive resistance, the roundups, the collaborationists, and the young communists are all part of the lore of wartime Paris, and Drake does a solid job exploring how it all affected “Parisians of all ages.”
Students of French and World War II history will enjoy and learn from this well-written book.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-674-50481-3
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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 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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