A detailed account of the tank battles in Normandy after D-Day when British, Canadian, Polish, and French forces moved off their landing beach sectors to meet the best of Nazi Germany's elite professionals—the Waffen SS Panzer Corps. Reynolds, a retired British major general and former high- ranking NATO officer (The Devils Adjutant, 1995, etc.), focuses on the makeup of the feared SS units that stopped the Allied advances and threatened to drive the citizen soldiers back into the sea. Though fighting for one of the most brutal regimes of all time, they were considered some of the best troops in modern times. The early Waffen SS selectees were highly motivated teenagers who were trained to excel in obedience and self-sacrifice. Pride, courage, and mastery of the best weapons and tactics in tank warfare were stressed. Most of their officers rose from the ranks as highly decorated, battle-hardened veterans. In addition, the American Sherman tanks were no match for the German Tiger and Panther tanks. The SS units inflicted heavy losses on the Allies and, when his forces failed to move forward at Caen, almost caused Gen. Montgomery to be replaced. Massive Allied air power and devastating naval gunfire helped to save the day, destroying German strongholds, equipment, and supplies and ending a bloody war of attrition. Reynolds describes the failure of the Allies at Falaise to seal off the German retreat but believes that it was the fierce Panzer counterattack rather than Allied bungling that spared the Germans. Reynolds seems to give less credit to the American GIs, disregarding Patton's destruction of the German left wing, which forced the enemy to flee toward Falaise, as well as the key American seizures of crucial terrain at Cherbourg and in Brittany. A British view of the Normandy battles, and a well researched narrative drawing heavily on German as well as Allied archives. (Military Book Club selection)
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-885119-44-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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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