A solid military history focused on an elite division that made its mark in the final stages of World War II.
A pioneering military unit’s history, culminating in its breaking the German hold on Italy’s mountains during World War II.
Isserman (American History/Hamilton Coll.; Continental Divide: A History of American Mountaineering, 2017, etc.) traces the story of the 10th Mountain Division from its inception at a meeting of four skiers in 1940, when Finnish ski troops were resisting the invading Germans. One of them, Charles Minot Dole, decided to take the idea of training and equipping an American ski regiment. At first met with indifference, he managed to convince the War Department to take the idea seriously. The Army set up a training facility in mountain country and began to recruit trained skiers to man the new unit. Eventually, the training camp was located at Camp Hale in the Colorado Rockies, and the soldiers also took lessons in mountain climbing. At first, there was no obvious mission for the 10th Mountain. A mission to the Aleutian Island of Kiska turned out to be a fiasco when the Japanese occupiers evacuated before the U.S. troops arrived. Men were transferring to other units in order to find combat somewhere. It wasn’t until late in the war—December 1944—that the stalled front in the Italian mountains presented a perfect spot for their skills. While the Germans were already in retreat elsewhere in Europe, Hitler ordered them to hold the line in Italy. The 10th Mountain took the critical peaks and ridges to which they were sent; they also endured heavy casualties in the process. Isserman draws on the division’s extensive archives, including personal accounts by many of the surviving soldiers. He focuses on several individuals from their induction to the end of the war, giving the book the feel of an old war movie with a cast drawn from all parts of the country. The division’s long time in training makes the narrative a slow build, but once the 10th Mountain gets to Italy, there’s plenty of payoff.
A solid military history focused on an elite division that made its mark in the final stages of World War II.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-87143-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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