On D-Day the Das Reich, or 2nd Panzer Division, was at Montauban in southern France, 450 miles—and, supposedly, a few days—from the Normandy battlefront. Why, instead, "the Das Reich Division trickled into the rear battlefields piecemeal," some ten to 25 days later, is the spine on which Hastings (Yoni, Bomber Command) hangs an array of disclosures, insights, and reflections. The book is not narrative history—the actual march of the Das Reich begins a third of the way through, and is then told in snatches; and the interests it addresses—sometimes, profoundly—are not those of the ordinary WW II buff. First, Hastings focuses on the French Section of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE)—operating out of London and via agents in France—which, with little support from SHAEF (and that, at Churchill's insistence), supplied the Resistance forces with the wherewithal (equipment, training, money) to prevent the Das Reich from moving north by train and impede the column's progress by road. But the Germans also decided, to the surprise of the Allies, to fight the local resistants (Hitler would give no ground); and so delayed themselves. Few resistants, in turn, "understood fire discipline": they wasted ammunition and, under German counterattack, quickly took flight. (All the more remarkable, thinks Hastings, their accomplishments.) Uninvolved civilians, mostly apathetic or openly unsympathetic, then suffered German reprisals: notoriously, the killing of hostages after the Tulle insurrection, the unprovoked massacre at Oradour. Here, Hastings' findings are stark. "Painful though it may be for humanitarians to accept, a policy of unlimited repression can be formidably effective"; further immediate resistance was discouraged. And to the SS officers, hardened on the Russian front, "It was nothing"—as a veteran of Oradour put it long afterward. Hastings also has highly interesting, almost self-contained chapters on the inter-Allied Jedburgh teams and the "private army" Special Air Service (SAS)—briefly involved at different points on the Das Reich march. What the book lacks in unity, indeed, it makes up in diversity and penetration. The ideal reader, though, would be familiar with the setting or the special branches.
Pub Date: May 1, 1982
ISBN: 003057059X
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1982
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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