A brisk, suspenseful World War II narrative from a proven storyteller.
In the latest in a wave of books about the Japanese attack, British author and former journalist Best (Five Days that Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II, 2012, etc.) reaches around the world to ascertain what actually happened near and on Dec. 7, 1941.
Some of the author’s historical snapshots have nothing to do with Pearl Harbor directly—e.g., a glimpse at the German front line close to Moscow, where the Nazis were halted by Russian resistance; or the Hollywood director William Wyler’s making of Mrs. Miniver and his controversial choice of an evil Nazi character rather than a sympathetic German. Yet each of the narrative’s segments reveals how the war was beginning to insinuate itself into everyone’s life, whether one was aware of the events or not: on Dec. 2, Lady Diana and Duff Cooper were entertaining guests on the prize British battleship HMS Prince of Wales just off the British island of Singapore, little suspecting that the Japanese would strike Singapore soon after Pearl Harbor, sink the great ship, overrun the island, and essentially destroy British imperial ambitions. Inside the basement Cabinet War Room in London, Winston Churchill kept his maps to plot the Nazi menace as well as the Japanese forays into the South Pacific; it was there that the staff had lost track of Japan’s aircraft carriers. The author follows closely the severing of diplomatic relations between the Japanese representatives and the Americans and President Franklin Roosevelt’s intuitive act of writing a heart-to-heart letter to Emperor Hirohito at the eleventh hour—which would reach Japan too late. Then there is the tragic story on the ground, where the Navy staff, under the able Adm. Husband Kimmel, essentially did its job but lacked enough of a sense of vigilance or urgency.
A brisk, suspenseful World War II narrative from a proven storyteller.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07801-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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