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 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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