From the author of The Face of Battle: a dazzler among military histories. Keegan opens with his World War II: a Swallows and Amazons idyll, in the West of England, incongruously consumed with soldiering and utterly complacent: "Britain could not lose"—not with the Empire, "all those other people" (wearing Free French, etc., shoulder patches), and the mighty Americans arrayed, as one, against Hitler. What follows is the reality behind the illusion, not only among children, of Allied unanimity. The oft-told story of the British-American Second Front debate is recast, compellingly, in terms of salient individuals: Stilwell—appalled at 1941 Washington disarray; Wedemeyer—author of a Victory Program, born of his German military training, for a great land war in Western Europe; Eisenhower—who converted Wedemeyer's Program into a plan of action, which the British agreed to; Molotov—whose report of Russian losses, and "insulting logic," persuaded FDR to announce a 1942 Second Front; Marshall—forced by the British to settle, instead, for a North African expedition; Brooke, his cautious opposite number—backed into a 1944 cross-Channel invasion, finally, by American and Russian pressure. Also, pre-D-Day: Montgomery—who insisted on more men, and a wider front, lest the invasion forced be "Dunkirked"—and Rommel, who intended (given the means) to do just that. The outcome would now rest with groups of fighting men: in Keegan's inspired re-envisioning of the Normandy campaign itself, six crucially engaged, emblematic armies. American paratroopers "drop into darkness" behind Utah Beach and, scattered but mostly game, "blunder about looking for each other" (causing further confusion among the Germans). Canadian seaborne infantrymen land successfully under German fire, sparing Canada another Dieppe, and move farther inland than any other D-Day force. Scottish Highlanders, Lowlanders, and Territorials (Keegan is wicked on "Balmorality") prise open the first corridor from the beachhead. British and Scottish armored forces—"yeomen" of the 2nd Household Cavalry—suffer terrible losses, without losing ground, in the assault at Caen. The German counter-attack at Mortain is doomed—because, for one, the failed officers' plot against Hitler has made prudent yes-men of his battlefield commanders. A Polish armored division, powerless to aid the Warsaw uprising, rushes jubilantly to cut off the Germans inside the Falaise Salient. And the Free French manage—through "a stroke of misinformation"—to bring about the unscheduled liberation of Paris. The character of national armies, the play of chance and circumstance, the imperatives of technology and strategy—all are brilliantly interwoven and elaborated. If anyone can convert the thoughtful reader to "war books," it will be Keegan.
Pub Date: July 1, 1982
ISBN: 0140235426
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1982
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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