Poignant interviews by survivors and thoughtful reflections by a skilled journalist and historian combine to create a truly...
A comprehensive exploration of the Royal Air Force’s enormous toil and sacrifice in their efforts to wear down the Luftwaffe.
British journalist Wilson (Airborne in 1943: The Daring Allied Air Campaign over the North Sea, 2018, etc.) interviewed more than 100 surviving participants of these squadrons, along with members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and German fighters and witnesses, and he creates an eloquent, moving account of these relentless raids over German territory in the opening months of 1944. The author begins in medias res, with the grueling Battle of Berlin, a three month–long campaign that would grow so disastrous in numbers—6,185 crewmen lost their lives, 133 would become prisoners of war, 492 night bombers perished—that it ultimately proved a “campaign that [drained] the lifeblood from Bomber Command.” Moreover, the extent to which it contributed to the crippling of the Nazi war machine is debatable, as the damage to Berlin was relatively mild, to the dismay of Air Marshal Arthur “Butch” Harris, who had promised Prime Minister Churchill that the Berlin air campaign “would cost Germany the war.” However, unlike the firestorm that destroyed Hamburg the previous July, the wide boulevards of Berlin did not lend themselves to extensive area-bombing damage. British soldiers were further hindered by the foul weather and the ingenious “Schräge Musik” design of the German Nachtjäger planes, which were effective against the British Lancasters and Halifaxes. Wilson organizes the narrative by season, moving from winter’s heavy tolls and lowest points of morale after night campaigns over Berlin, Magdeburg, Leipzig, and Nuremberg to spring’s more successful Transportation Plan—i.e., cutting German lines of communication in northern France and Belgium in the run-up to D-Day. Ultimately, despite Harris’ resistance, it was the targeting of the oil plants in the Ruhr that would be "the war winner.”
Poignant interviews by survivors and thoughtful reflections by a skilled journalist and historian combine to create a truly touching war portrait.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-006-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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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