A valuable contribution to the history of a catastrophic raid.
Prolific novelist DeFelice (Leopards Kill, 2007, etc.) turns to nonfiction and brings to life a disastrous World War II encounter.
American infantry first battled the Nazis in August 1942, when Allied forces raided the coastal French town of Dieppe and suffered massive casualties. There were only 50 U.S. Rangers among 5,000 Canadian and British attackers, so previous accounts have paid little attention to their contribution. DeFelice tracked down survivors and additional documentation that helped him produce a vivid, detailed picture of the Rangers’s baptism by fire. The elite unit had just been formed in June 1942, and when word of a major special operation reached its leader, Major William Darby, he selected 50 men for “advanced training in demolitions”—combat experience. Describing the raid’s planning and execution, the author resists the urge to blame a single culprit for the debacle. Historians generally agree that Allied leaders yearned to take pressure off retreating Russian forces, Churchill loved special operations and planners made a string of wrong decisions, rejecting a heavy pre-invasion bombardment and assuming that the defending German divisions were weak. The Rangers shared in the general failure and the minor successes. Small commando units landed east and west of Dieppe to successfully silence coastal defenses. Large Canadian forces made a suicidal frontal assault on the unexpectedly well-defended town. Most of the Americans did not make it to shore because of problems with their landing craft; three died, three became prisoners and only four returned uninjured. With lucid prose DeFelice knowledgeably contradicts some aspects of previous accounts.
A valuable contribution to the history of a catastrophic raid.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-425-21921-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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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