The recent, deglorifying accounts of D-Day and after (John Keegan, Max Hastings) left untouched the repute of the British Sixth Airborne Division—one unit of which, the gliderborne troops of Major John Howard's D Company, made the first, crucial Normandy landing. For Ambrose, maximum-biographer of Eisenhower, this brief chronicle of a single engagement in a busman's holiday for fair: leading a veterans' battlefield tour in 1981, Ambrose was approached at Pegasus Bridge—one of the pair of crossings, over the Caen Canal and Ouse River, that Company D captured and held on D-Day—by none other than Major Howard . . . from whom (along with other British and German survivors) he later got much of this story. It's foremost a story of preparation. From the overloaded Horsa gliders soundlessly approaching their pinpoint landing zone at 0007 on D-Day, Ambrose switches to the preceding two years of training and planning, boredom and break-outs: Howard's fanatical emphasis on physical fitness and mental alertness; the endless nighttime simulations, the practice with German weapons; the intelligence, unprecedented in detail and currency (the scale model of the site was changed daily, on the basis of French-underground and aerial-reconnaissance reports); the sense, to a man, "that D-Day would be the greatest day of their lives." Howard's company succeeds in taking the bridges intact, thanks partly to luck and German weaknesses (a carousing officer, feeble non-German conscript troops). A single corporal, with the company's one functioning anti-tank weapon, holds the bridges until paratroop reinforcements arrive—in effect securing the invasion's entire eastern flank—while Hitler's insistence on giving every order delays a German counterattack until midday. But Howard loses his officers, by having them lead their platoons from the front. After D-Day, we learn, D Company reverted to being an ordinary infantry company, a waste Ambrose decries, and the British never mounted another such coup de main—"not for the bridge at Arnhem, nor the one at Nijmegen." Howard, a reckless driver, was seriously injured in a motor accident and crippled trying to get back into trim. Others of the men became friendly, even intimate, with their German counterparts (one of them now a British citizen). Ambrose is little given to dramatizing, and he apologizes for superlatives: recounted close-in, with soldierly affability and snap, the facts don't need embellishment.
Pub Date: March 25, 1985
ISBN: 0671671561
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1985
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
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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