Armchair military historians will relish this account of bringing down the biggest prey in the German fleet.
Military historian Bishop (Battle of Britain, 2009, etc.) fashions an exciting, detail-packed account of the British obsession with dismantling Hitler’s prize battleship.
Named after the architect of the Imperial German Navy, Tirpitz was the great hope in Hitler’s plan to crack the supremacy of the British navy, the lifeblood of a nation reliant on maritime trade. Along with its sister ships, the steel-plated, seemingly invincible Tirpitz was employed in the North Atlantic to disrupt British trade convoys so that Hitler could turn his attention to attacking Russia. In his patiently descriptive account of the Battle of Britain, Bishop traces the key engagements, such as the bringing down of the Bismarck after an extremely costly pummeling by British torpedoes, which underscored how outmoded and outclassed the British fleet was. Subsequently, the British were on continual lookout for the deadly but elusive Tirpitz, about which Churchill maintained: “No other target is comparable to it.” Commanded initially by Capt. Karl Topp, with a crew of 2,600 living aboard in fairly luxurious style, Tirpitz was moved to Trondheim, Norway, keenly followed by British intelligence. Bomber Command devised several ill-begotten raids with “roly-poly” bombs, yet nothing could touch the massive ship, which posed a continual threat to the Russian convoys. Special Operations were enlisted to come up with a raiding plan, and new bombs and midget submarines were tested and honed in Scotland for the great mission undertaken in September 1943. Bishop builds a suspenseful story, delineating the crews involved on both sides in a sneak attack that required extraordinary courage from the seamen, who were under duress.
Armchair military historians will relish this account of bringing down the biggest prey in the German fleet.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1621570035
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Regnery History
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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