Keegan (The Mask of Command, 1987); Six Armies in Normandy, 1982; The Face of Battle, 1976; etc.) here offers a bravura appreciation of naval power down through the ages. In aid of his era-spanning study, the former Sandhurst lecturer (who points out that no Briton lives more than 80 miles from tidal waters) examines four landmark naval engagements, each of which featured different types of warship. First off, he analyzes 1805's battle of Trafalgar, in which England's wooden-wall vessels under the command of Lord Horatio Nelson defeated a French/Spanish fleet in atypically decisive fashion. More than a century later, in 1916, Germany's dreadnoughts achieved a Pyrrhic sort of victory over the Royal Navy off Jutland—the first clash of ironclads. With his customary economy and flair for telling detail, the author also recounts the battle of Midway, where US carrier forces slugged it out with a similar Japanese flotilla to gain an upper hand in WW II's Pacific theater. Last but not least, he audits the long-running Atlantic campaign in which Nazi U-boats (at no small cost) took a terrible toll on Allied shipping. Although Keegan focuses on just four remarkable conflicts, he does not restrict himself to their immediate circumstances and implications. In an interpretive afterword, for instance, he comments on the significance of UK losses to missiles and aircraft during 1982 encounters with Argentine forces around the Falkland Islands. The author does so, moreover, in the context of the development of true submarines (as opposed to "merely submersible" ships). Conceding that underwater communications remain a problem, Keegan speculates that one day the world's oceans may be largely empty of surface vessels. In addition, he assesses the piratical origins of naval warfare and includes a wealth of nautical lore. During the Napoleonic Wars, for example, British sailors threw dead comrades overboard (to keep decks clear for fighting); their French and Spanish foes had to do battle amidst the fallen because Catholic widows could not remarry in the absence of bodies to bury. A hell-and-high-water chronicle that's as absorbing as it is illuminating. The concise text includes 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations (not seen).
Pub Date: March 28, 1989
ISBN: 0140096507
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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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