All involved receive due honor here. A boon for buffs of the Napoleonic Wars, and a sturdy complement to Adam Nicolson’s...
A thoroughgoing study of the most famous sea battle of the Napoleonic era, timed for its bicentenary.
All battles have the potential to be world-changing, of course, but Trafalgar had immediately perceptible effects that proved its importance at once. In the first years of the 19th century, writes historian/archaeologist Adkins, Napoleon’s forces were massing in such numbers on the Normandy coast that their vast camps were plainly visible across the English Channel; the army and the thousands of ships supporting it were meant to stage an invasion such as had not been seen since the time of the Armada, and the English government took the threat seriously enough to make contingency plans for a last-stand defense far inland. The real line of defense, though, was the Royal Navy. At Trafalgar, off the Spanish coast, Lord Horatio Nelson drew out the allied Spanish and French fleets, which he feared would disappear into the Mediterranean only to return in support of the invasion. The lead-up to that great battle had taken months and spanned the Atlantic. Nelson’s tactics were brilliant, but the French were no slouches—and yet the Royal Navy proved victorious in some measure, Adkins suggests, because Napoleon mistrusted his own admirals and thrust elaborate and unworkable plans upon them in an effort to thwart the enemy. Adkins has a tendency to go textbookish in the thick of battle, but his detailed examinations of such things as the relative weights of musket balls and the general awfulness of shipboard cuisine give the reader a little breathing room between tension-filled episodes that involve no small amount of carnage.
All involved receive due honor here. A boon for buffs of the Napoleonic Wars, and a sturdy complement to Adam Nicolson’s more exuberant Seize the Fire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03448-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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
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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