A well-rendered popular history describing war and great men.
Historical account of the relations between the three Allied leaders during World War II.
Kelly begins on June 22, 1941. Having dismissed repeated warnings from Britain, his spies, and Red Army units along the border, Stalin remained stubbornly loyal to his friendship treaty with Hitler, so that day’s massive German invasion caught the Soviet Union unprepared. After the opening, the author alternates between the fighting and Stalin’s subjects as they tried to get along and manage the various campaigns. Although certainly as evil as Hitler, Stalin may have been less of a megalomaniac. Both micromanaged their armies with terrible consequences, but a year of disaster persuaded Stalin to step back; thereafter, he often took his generals’ advice. Although it was Stalin’s own fault, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the violence and casualties, and he never let Churchill and Roosevelt forget it. Many Russian historians have argued that the Allies deliberately held back their armies, only jumping in once the Wehrmacht was in full retreat in 1944. The conventional portrait of Roosevelt and Churchill as a harmonious team was only accurate early in the war. By 1943, with America the dominant partner and exasperated at Churchill’s reluctance to support a cross-channel invasion, Roosevelt began calling the shots. A gifted politician, he believed he could deal with Stalin better than the conservative Churchill, and historians give him low marks for the results. In his defense, Kelly points out that ruthlessness is a poor substitute for intellect. With the Red Army on the spot, Stalin had no trouble installing puppet governments throughout Eastern Europe. His goal—protection from a resurgent Germany—proved unnecessary, and the satellites produced only trouble and expense for his already dysfunctional economy. The author relies mostly on secondary sources, but he chooses them well. As a result, this is high-quality history that will disturb only readers who learn about WWII from the History Channel.
A well-rendered popular history describing war and great men.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-306-90277-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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