First-rate, and evocative of why the war to end all wars was anything but.
An eye-opening study of the final hours of a war that threatened never to end.
The global bloodletting of 1914–18 was a phenomenal waste to begin with, or so many modern historians believe; as Persico (Roosevelt’s Secret War, 2001, etc.) writes, “It may be that the only value to mankind coming out of World War I was to provide the ultimate test of what human beings can endure under monstrously inhuman conditions and yet maintain their humanity.” Those conditions were monstrous indeed, no thanks to the combat leaders on all sides; Persico quotes, for instance, a British corps commander who complained that “the men are too keen on saving their own skins. They need to be taught that they are out here to do their job. Whether they survive or not is a matter of complete indifference.” More than five million on all sides died in the first five months of the conflict alone, and the carnage continued unabated for three more years, until by November 1918 the German Kaiser was finally persuaded to yield to the Allies. Amazingly, and depressingly, once the arrangements were made for the armistice to begin at the resonant 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the armies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, the British Empire, and the US were ordered to fight on; Allied forces along the Western Front were even commanded to attack only hours before the armistice was to go into effect, the idea apparently being to secure as much ground as possible before peace broke out. As a result, more died on November 11, 1918, than on D-Day a quarter-century later. Persico reconstructs these closing-hour events with grim irony, making them of a piece with dozens of instances of previous folly. And though he focuses closely on the final moments of the war, he ably encapsulates the whole conflict in a highly readable narrative.
First-rate, and evocative of why the war to end all wars was anything but.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50825-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
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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