With careful research, Kershaw tells an engaging story, blending Patton’s virtues and flaws into a well-drawn portrait.
A detailed study of the critical role of Gen. George Patton and his Third Army in World War II.
Of the many colorful figures to emerge from WWII, Patton is one of the most remarkable and notorious. Pugnacious, ruthless, and impetuous, he was a skilled battlefield tactician and always had one eye on history—especially his own. The problem faced by Kershaw—a journalist who has written a number of books about the war, including The Liberator, The Longest Winter, and The First Wave—is that there is already a shelf of volumes on Patton. The author tries to get around this issue by combining an analysis of Patton as a person and military leader with an account of the Third Army, which Patton commanded in the final stretch of the war. When Patton’s troops were bogged down in the winter mud and rain, he asked the senior chaplain to come up with an inspirational message mixed with a prayer. He did, and Patton was so pleased with it that he ordered 250,000 copies printed and distributed. The tactic worked because most of the American soldiers fought hard to delay and frustrate the German Ardennes counteroffensive. Patton often made a point of visiting the front line, and he had a secret wish to die a warrior's death in battle. However, he died due to complications following a car accident shortly after the end of the conflict. Kershaw handles all the material with authority, and even if there is not much new to say, he lets the charisma and mercurial nature of Patton shine through. Readers unfamiliar with Patton will find this book to be a solid, unadorned account, which is, perhaps, what Patton would have appreciated.
With careful research, Kershaw tells an engaging story, blending Patton’s virtues and flaws into a well-drawn portrait.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780593183779
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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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