An engaging human story of the complicated and fraught relationship between the French and their American allies.
A poignant World War II saga of the relationship between an American gunner shot down over France and the French family who helped him.
In his latest, Military History editor-in-chief Harding (Dawn of Infamy: A Sunken Ship, a Vanished Crew, and the Final Mystery of Pearl Harbor, 2016, etc.) tells the story of Joe Cornwall, who was part of the joint American and British group targeting Le Bourget airport near Paris on Bastille Day 1943. A horrendous collision sent Cornwall and some other survivors parachuting into the French countryside to spend months evading capture by the Germans. By a remarkable stroke of luck—and the help of kindly French people—Cornwall and a few of his buddies were directed to the shelter of the concierges of the famed Hôtel des Invalides in Paris, the home of invaluable works of art as well as famous tombs such as that of Napoleon. In the vast subterranean maze of the hotel, Georges Morin, a disabled veteran of World War I with a hatred for the Germans—along with his wife, Denise, and adult daughter, Yvette—sheltered several of the Allied soldiers. Harding gradually builds the suspense regarding the blossoming love between Cornwall and Yvette with nicely specific details of life in the Army and in occupied Paris. Eventually, the urgency of making the “home run” back to base in England required most of the survivors of the group to take the perilous route through Spain and the Pyrenees to Gibraltar. Ultimately, Cornwall did make the route home, somewhat later than his comrades, having secured an engagement with Yvette. Little did he know the perils that the Morins would face when they fell into the hands of the Gestapo.
An engaging human story of the complicated and fraught relationship between the French and their American allies.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-306-92216-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | 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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