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
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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