A story with many moving parts and players that's expertly told, one that sheds new light on the first glimmerings of total...
Illuminating study of the complex political calculus underlying Britain’s effort to avoid armed conflict with Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.
Most of the conservative leadership in Britain was aware from the start, if only dimly, that Hitler and his Nazis posed an existential threat to world order. Yet, after the bloodletting of World War I, writes Bouverie in this accomplished debut, there was no appetite for war, so that “the idea of a ‘preventive war’ to halt German rearmament was...beyond the realm even of discussion.” Even though most members of the political class found official Nazi anti-Semitism appalling, “there was a tendency amongst some to find excuses for it.” As a result, Britain stood by, acceding to German demands up to and including the annexation of a portion of Czechoslovakia with a large ethnic German population. As the author notes, that act of aggression was greeted enthusiastically by some Sudeten Germans but certainly not by the leftists, Jews, and members of other ethnic minorities who lived there. Hitler promised Britain’s prime minister that if his government met Germany’s “ ‘limited’ colonial demands,” there would be no further friction, but then came the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II. Examining a trove of unexplored documents, Bouverie turns a gimlet eye on excuses proffered in the aftermath, such as the thought that the year of peace bought by the appeasement of 1938 gave Britain time to prepare for war; as he notes, it also bought Germany an extra year to build up its forces against the numerically superior French and British armies. The author faults Chamberlain, too, for having “treated the United States with frigid disdain” when a stronger alliance might have averted some of Hitler’s mischief, though he does not doubt the purity of Chamberlain’s intentions to preserve the British Empire and keep the peace.
A story with many moving parts and players that's expertly told, one that sheds new light on the first glimmerings of total war.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49984-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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