A lucid contribution to the history of World War II.
Oppress a continent and kill millions of its inhabitants, and payback, when it comes, is likely to be ugly.
Such was the case when Nazi Germany fell in the first months of 1945, encircled by mighty Allied armies determined to put an end to Hitler’s regime. That year, writer Bessel (History/York Univ.; Nazism and War, 2004, etc.), began with a bloodbath, following the American and British breakthrough in the West after the unsuccessful breakout that would become known as the Battle of the Bulge. But the blood flowed more heavily in the East, following the Soviet offensive; it yielded the highest monthly total of German casualties of any month in the war, more than 450,000. It is difficult to feel much pity for the doctrinaire Nazis among those dead and wounded, but it is easy to gauge the desperation of their cause as the Red Army threw division after division against the Wehrmacht—indeed, so desperate were they that, in what will come as news to readers who forget the Russian contribution to the conflict, the German forces tried to stage a Battle of the Bulge in the East too, in the deep forests of Hungary. Their stiff resistance, and the fact that many Germans took seriously Hitler’s command to fight to the death even when it meant suicide, yielded a whirlwind of revenge. Bessel raises the question of whether the war might have been cut short had Eisenhower not insisted on unconditional surrender on the Western front—which his German counterpart rightly said was not in his power to grant. The war was not cut short, of course. Instead, Germany disintegrated into crime and anarchy in the last days of the regime, and countless Germans died needlessly as the conquering armies moved in. No nation has ever been so thoroughly defeated as Germany, Bessel helpfully notes, and it was by no means certain that it would emerge from ruin.
A lucid contribution to the history of World War II.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-054036-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 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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