Korda is a fluent storyteller with an eye for the ironies and political gamesmanship of the Battle of Britain. His book...
Spirited study of the world-changing aerial campaign waged nearly 70 years ago.
There have been many books about the Battle of Britain, including Patrick Bishop’s Fighter Boys (2003) and David E. Fisher’s A Summer Bright and Terrible (2005), to say nothing of Winston Churchill’s Their Finest Hour (1949). Historian Korda (Ike: An American Hero, 2007, etc.) picks up on a central part of Fisher’s story, namely the careful excision of Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding from the historical record. Dowding orchestrated the costly but ultimately successful defense of Britain against German bombing raids—successful, Korda asserts, because “Fighter Command was prepared for it,” unlike so many other air attacks in history past and present. Dowding is to be credited, by Korda’s account, for the development and installation of radar and two critically important aircrafts, the Hurricane and the Spitfire, but more for the intelligent organization of Britain’s air force into a flexible, carefully interlinked service quite unlike that of the German foe. Korda turns up surprises on the other side, too, including the initial reluctance of Hitler and Göring to drop bombs on civilian centers precisely because the British would answer in kind, thus risking morale among German civilians. Needless to say, the German leaders’ stance later changed, but both were deeply unhappy at the sort-of-accidental bombing of Croydon during the wave attacks of summer 1940. Korda even finds room to praise, faintly, the much-despised Göring: “nobody could deny his energy, his flair for publicity, or his lack of scruples in achieving his ambitions on the largest possible scale,” which included rebuilding Germany’s air force against international orders not to do so. That rebuilding, of course, is what allowed Germany’s blitzkrieg in the first place, a tide blunted but not halted by the RAF’s storied defense.
Korda is a fluent storyteller with an eye for the ironies and political gamesmanship of the Battle of Britain. His book isn’t quite required reading, as Churchill’s is, but it’s much fairer-minded.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-112535-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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 Yorkerstaff 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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