Hardly a page-turner, but a vivid account that will satisfy anyone with an interest in the Great War.
A monumental study of the maritime aspects of WWI, drawing on a great cast of characters and revisiting little-known battles and watery tombs.
Massie is an accomplished maker of knee-buckling tomes (Loosing the Bonds, 1997, etc.). Here, picking up where his Dreadnought (1991) left off, the author begins with the logical outcome of what happens when two contending powers—in this case, Germany and England—fit themselves with world-girding, phenomenally well-armed fleets: they take the fight out to sea. The First World War saw a military innovation in the widespread, even unrestricted use of submarines, and Massie breaks news by revealing that the Germans had a clear opportunity to sink the Lusitania’s sister ocean liner Mauretania but did not. U-boats had an advantage over Allied submarines in that British ports and harbors tended to be deep, whereas German harbors were too shallow to attack submerged; the Allies, one might conjecture from reading Massie’s pages, also didn’t really know how to make use of submarines as tactical weapons. They did, however, finally figure out how to deploy convoys and submarine-killing “Q-ships” late in the war, a development Lloyd George claimed as his own. (“ ‘The little popinjay,’ ” remarked First Lord Edward Carson on reading George’s claim, “has told ‘the biggest lie ever was told!’ ”) Massie devotes a full sixth of his study to the critically important Battle of Jutland, which yielded a pyrrhic victory for Britain at tremendous cost—the loss of three battle cruisers, two light cruisers, and many other craft. He refutes earlier historians’ claims that the result of the battle was to confine the German fleet to home waters, when in fact it came out in force three more times—once to shell the coast of Scotland. Massie’s account has plenty of heroes (Jellicoe, Scheer, even Winston Churchill), villains and dunderheads (Kaiser Wilhelm II, Lord Beatty) and clashing egos to match all those battles at sea, and well reveals his mastery of period detail.
Hardly a page-turner, but a vivid account that will satisfy anyone with an interest in the Great War.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-679-45671-6
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
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
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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