A stark, challenging-to-read picture of the war from the bottom up.
A meticulous chronicle of ordinary people in the extreme circumstances of war.
When looking at the epic sweep of World War II, it is easy to forget that the big picture involves millions of personal experiences. Englund, a member of the Swedish Academy and winner of the August Prize, draws on diaries, journals, memoirs, and records to delve into the lives of those who lived through the war. He covers the gamut from battle-hardened soldiers to home-front civilians, from a concentration-camp inmate to a scientist working on the Manhattan Project. The frame for the narrative is the month of November 1942, which the author sees as the pivotal point in the war. After that, with the tide turning at Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, and in North Africa, it was just a question of time for the Axis countries. This is a massive undertaking, ably translated by Graves, who worked with Englund on a previous book, The Beauty and the Sorrow, which similarly looked at World War I. The tone of this book is unremittingly grim, and some of the most heartrending stories are those of civilians who were swept up by the flood. One of the most painful is that of Mun Okchu, a young Korean woman forced into sex slavery by the Japanese army. Amazingly, she survived the protracted ordeal. Englund deserves admiration for bringing such an impressive body of research together, but the text is sometimes difficult to follow. The narrative, set out chronologically, leaps from one place to another and between characters. With this disjointed structure, readers may struggle to engage fully with the individual stories or remember who is where. Perhaps Englund would have done better to focus on fewer people and narrate their tales more coherently. The book is commendable but not for everyone.
A stark, challenging-to-read picture of the war from the bottom up.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781524733315
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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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