A suspenseful, well-wrought account of battling ships at sea and grave wartime conditions.
Blow-by-blow account of the Allied battles against four potent German warships that “posed a mortal threat to Britain’s survival, killers ready to sever the nation’s vital arteries to its empire and the United States.”
Early on in his latest well-told military tale, versatile historian Read notes the seemingly endless frustration caused by the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Bismarck, and Tirpitz, with Winston Churchill lamenting, “Besides the constant struggle with the U-boats…surface raiders had already cost us over three-quarters of a million tons of shipping.” Strategically situated in the harbor at Brest, France, the ships gave the Germans a significant advantage, allowing them to "wreak bloody havoc" on the Allied convoys carrying necessary supplies. In addition to their imposing armor and artillery, they were swift and elusive. “With a top speed each of 31 knots,” writes the author, “they were faster than any British ship. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, well aware of this fact, deemed them ‘targets of supreme consequence.’ ” Indeed, as Read points out in this exciting narrative, the destruction caused by these four ships “would become Churchill’s obsession.” Catching them as they moved toward Norway and the Baltic shipping waters would cost the British dearly—e.g., the May 1941 sinking of the Hood, “the pride of the Royal Navy,” which killed all but three of the 1,418 crew aboard. In addition to the pulse-pounding narrative of the ships in battle, including profiles of the many sailors who lost their lives on both sides, Read demonstrates the big-picture importance of the Battle of the Atlantic in helping sustain Britain's heavily rationed population and its war machine with food, equipment, and raw materials. The success in “securing the Atlantic sea lanes” was crucial to victories in subsequent battles.
A suspenseful, well-wrought account of battling ships at sea and grave wartime conditions.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-306-92171-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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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