by John Keegan ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1982
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
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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