A lively, sharp WWII history.
A New Yorker contributing writer and Observer critic tells the story of how volunteers in the Women’s Royal Naval Service helped the British military win the battle against German U-boats during World War II.
As Parkin (Death by Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline, 2016, etc.) shows, in 1940, the British navy was struggling badly. German U-boats had sunk more than 1,200 vessels and done more damage to British shipping than the German navy and Luftwaffe combined. Civilians were dying, as well, and with every ship lost, Britain had one less way to carry much-needed food and supplies back from the United States. To protect public morale and keep the Germany military in the dark, Winston Churchill imposed a blackout on all information regarding shipping losses from U-boats. Meanwhile, Gilbert Roberts, a former British naval officer forced into early retirement by tuberculosis, came up with an idea that, though initially dismissed by members of the British admiralty, eventually turned the tide of war against the Germans. Using a Battleship-style game to simulate lost sea battles, Roberts reasoned he could help naval officers to understand each situation “from all angles.” His assistants included a team of exceptionally gifted young women from the newly formed “Wrens” unit. Using “string, chalk, great sheets of canvas [and] linoleum,” Roberts and the Wrens devised and tested countermaneuvers, including one dubbed “Raspberry,” which they taught to skeptical British naval officers. By the summer of 1942, Britain began seeing an increase in the number of U-boat sinkings, but the greatest victory came in 1943, when a convoy of British ships survived attacks by “wolfpacks” that included some of Germany’s most decorated U-boat commanders. With novelistic flair, Parkin transforms material gathered from research, interviews, and unpublished accounts into a highly readable book that celebrates the ingenuity of a British naval “reject” and the accomplishments of the formerly faceless women never officially rewarded for their contribution to the Allied defeat of Germany.
A lively, sharp WWII history.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-49209-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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