A polished, readable narrative by an expert.
An opinionated, technical survey of air warfare.
Leading military historian van Creveld (The Land of Blood and Honey: The Rise of Modern Israel, 2010, etc.) includes both naval aviation (e.g., the importance of the use of carriers at Midway and the Falklands) and space (e.g., missiles, satellites and drones), taking into account the effort of fabricating these fabulous machines by war-happy nations. The author considers the awkward beginnings; the heyday in the 1920s when flying was fun (making races and world records); the serious business of two world wars, especially World War II (the rapid development of radar “promised to change the entire nature of war in the air”); and the “little wars” that proved so devastating and decisive to the fates of great nations since 1945 (e.g., Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). From the beginning, the makers of flying machines knew their value to armies, and the Wright Brothers indeed tried to sell their invention to the U.S. Army, which at first declined. Van Creveld delves into what he calls the important “civilized” versus “uncivilized” wars between 1919 and 1939—“civilized” being wars waged between equal powers (e.g., the Spanish Civil War, which allowed the Germans and Soviets to test their air-fighter strength) and “uncivilized” wars waged on third-world countries in Asia and Africa. Some of the latter air battles garner especially compelling treatment, such as airpower used in Korea, which didn’t have any industry or strategic targets to speak of, and was a war notable for the use of helicopters; and the 1967 air attack by Israel on the Sinai, the second largest after Korea and a victorious showcase of air strength. Chapters entitled “The Twilight of Naval Aviation” and “Going Down, 1945-?” give an idea of the author’s belief in the dwindling effectiveness of this once-dynamic arm of the military.
A polished, readable narrative by an expert.Pub Date: April 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58648-981-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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