An accomplished historian with a welcome personal touch.
Former longtime American Heritage editor Snow (Coney Island: A Postcard Journey to the City of Fire, 1983, etc.) examines the Atlantic theater of World War II, where his father fought.
The Pacific is often considered the primary locale for the naval battles of WWII, but the effort in the Atlantic, centered on protecting supply lines between the United States and Europe, was no less vital. Snow uses the experiences of his father, a Navy man who had served in the Atlantic, as a jumping-off point to tell the wider story of what would be known as the Battle of the Atlantic (1939–1945), in which Allied ships were pitted against hard-to-track German submarines. The Atlantic war began in earnest after a German U-boat torpedoed and sunk a British passenger ship in 1939. The author shows how the situation complicated the United States’ then-neutral stance in the war. Soon Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt began corresponding, leading to a deal in which the United States sold destroyers to the British, bypassing the antiwar Congress. In December 1941, Hitler ordered German U-boats to attack American ships, bringing the States fully into the Atlantic war. It proved to be a grueling, drawn-out affair, the longest continuous campaign of World War II. Churchill called the struggle against the German U-boats “the only thing that ever really frightened [him] during the war.” Snow looks at several important figures in the campaign, and he writes at length about Karl Doenitz, the commander of the German submarine fleet, whose strategic thinking about the use of submarines—specifically, using U-boats to focus on attacking merchant ships—transformed naval warfare. The author also uses letters and recollections of his father, providing a palpable sense of the daily activity of an enlisted man in the Atlantic war.
An accomplished historian with a welcome personal touch.Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9110-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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