A harrowing—and, in this era of drones, absolutely pertinent—look at the rapacious reaches of man’s murderous imagination.
A British historian of considerable breadth and accomplishment, Preston (The Dark Defile: Britain's Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842, 2012, etc.) focuses on three wartime innovations that elevated to new heights mankind’s ability to slaughter itself: submarines, zeppelins and poison gas.
All were advanced to marvelous efficacy during the first weeks of World War I, thanks largely to the technologically savvy Germans, who shook off the world’s condemnation of their first use of asphyxiating gas to spur the trench stalemate in Belgium, with the justification that the other side would promptly use it, too—and they were right. The first Geneva Convention in 1864 drew up agreed-upon protocols for treating the sick and wounded in war and created the Red Cross. The Hague Peace Conference of 1899, in the cause of “humanizing war,” considered banning certain weapons, such as asphyxiating gases and projectiles and explosives launched from the air. To little avail: Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin had secured German financing for his dirigible prototype by 1900; the first U-boat had arrived at the Krupp’s plant in 1906 and was pushed into production because of British advances in submarines; and chemist Fritz Haber, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, arrived at the solution to blow chlorine gas over enemy trenches. (Not to be forgotten is Alfred Nobel’s development of dynamite and smokeless powder.) All available methods would be enlisted to help Germany embark on a swift and lethal thrust in the spring of 1915, dropping bombs by zeppelin over London, torpedoing the Lusitania and killing 1,198 people, and gassing troops of young men who had no idea how to manage a chemical attack. In what is often difficult but necessary reading, Preston provides haunting descriptions of the effects of poison gas.
A harrowing—and, in this era of drones, absolutely pertinent—look at the rapacious reaches of man’s murderous imagination.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1620402122
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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 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
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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