Groom brings little news, but that may be beside the point; he means the book, it appears, to make “the average American...
Novelist-historian Groom (A Storm in Flanders, 2001; etc.) turns his hand to WWII, with mixed results.
The time was what namesake Winston Churchill called “the hinge of fate”: In the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor bombing and the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, the Axis seemed in great danger of achieving global dominance. Thanks to the Red Army on the eastern front, British forces in North Africa and island-hopping U.S. marines, soldiers and sailors in the Pacific, that overarching victory was denied, but at terrific cost. Groom apparently has little interest in the contribution of non-English speakers to the struggle; “In 1942,” he writes of the U.S.-U.K. alliance, “it was basically these two great powers that fought the war on the razor’s edge against the Axis cabal.” Try telling that to, oh, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: but no matter, for in Groom’s version there is not much room for fine distinctions, and so here sniveling Uruguayans wait for signs of certain Allied victory before joining the cause, while evil Black Shirts go about beating up whomever they please—all good for a period sequel to Casablanca, but a little light for a serious book written half a century after the fact. Still, there are shining moments here. Groom’s brief account of the spy ring that broke Vichy naval codes, for instance, is worth a movie of its own. His rebuke to ideologically motivated writers who suggest that FDR knew of the impending Japanese attack is a pleasure: “To follow all the arguments suggesting that Roosevelt conspired to let the Pacific command be surreptitiously attacked by the empire of Japan is exceedingly tedious and in the end wasteful because it denies simple logic.” And his account of the Guadalcanal campaign is full of vivid if often quite gruesome vignettes of battle.
Groom brings little news, but that may be beside the point; he means the book, it appears, to make “the average American reader” feel a little better about the present war on terror. Skillfully written, but not his best effort.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-87113-889-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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