A thoroughly unsatisfactory conclusion to Sir Martin’s ambitious but flawed history of the 20th century. One problem lies in the haste with which the book was assembled. Sir Martin, the eminent biographer of Sir Winston Churchill and author of more than 50 books, notes that he handed the typescript for the previous volume to his publisher in July 1998. It is easy to calculate that he must then have had to research (or at least absorb the research of associates), write, and bring to publication a 990-page tome in just over a year. His haste shows. Though Gilbert concentrates on the Cold War, he has missed much important research; in dealing with the Cuban missile crisis, he makes no mention, for example, of the secret Kennedy agreement to remove US missiles from Turkey. The entire question of the complicity of the Kennedy administration in the murder of Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem is dismissed with the phrase that the blame “was laid by many onlookers at the feet of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.— Gilbert correctly notes that “few revolutions in the twentieth century were so total, so dramatic and so globally significant as the fall and destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991,— yet he gives the event a one-sentence explanation. In this context some of his conclusions are baffling: that the Soviet Union “was not far behind the United States in scientific developments, and in some respects was ahead.” In a particularly vapid —Retrospect,— he notes that “mass murder features in another aspect of the twentieth century— but gives no explanation for that horrendous development; instead he presents apologies by the British government for the execution of 300 soldiers for cowardice in WWI. Sir Martin’s gifts have always been those of a narrative historian, yet he has failed in this volume to provide an adequate understanding of the events he describes.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-10066-X
Page Count: 990
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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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