The 50th anniversary of WW II's onset has triggered a spate of books from British and American authors. Few if any will be superior to Keegan's lengthy (592-page)but concise overview. The former Sandhurst lecturer (The Price of Admiralty, The Mask of Command, Soldiers, Six Armies in Normandy, et al.) begins his panoramic narrative deep in the past, i.e., with a coherent account of the socioeconomic advances that permitted global conflicts in the 20th century. Having provided stage-setting perspectives, he delivers insightful appreciations of the crucial battles and turning-point campaigns that—at no small cost in blood and treasure—enabled the allies to defeat the Axis powers. Covered as well are the strategic dilemmas that confronted Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, and Tojo as they deployed arms and men throughout the European and Pacific theaters, from the fall of 1939 through the late summer of 1945. Along the way, Keegan offers acute commentary on the major combatants' industrial capabilities, home-front morale, and espionage efforts, plus resistance movements in occupied countries. A graceful writer as well as a knowledgeable student of martial history, he enlivens his chronicle with wry wit, e.g., "(Semyon) Budenny had a fine mustache but no military brain." An informed and informative accounting of a horrific war that, the author suggests in an affecting epilogue, might just have saved the world from wider-ranging hostilities. The text is profusely illustrated, with dramatic photographs and helpful maps throughout.
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1989
ISBN: 0143035738
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1989
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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