Morton insists that Edward never really wanted to be king and implies that Simpson never wanted to marry him. A better book...
Morton (William & Catherine: Their Story, 2011, etc.) takes a break from his unauthorized biographies of the rich and famous to dig into the archives regarding the incompetent King Edward VIII and his American wife, Wallis Simpson.
The story is well-known: The Prince of Wales fell for a twice-married lady from Baltimore and eventually abdicated his throne for her. Edward was effectively banished by the new king, George VI, to avoid comparisons to his much more charismatic brother, and made the Duke of Windsor. This story is really about Edward and Simpson’s close ties to the Nazis, including a visit with Hitler. While still in England, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s special deputy who was mad for Wallis, became a fixture in their set. He convinced the king of Germany’s good intentions, strengthening Edward’s support of Hitler’s economic success. But Edward overstepped his position as king when he interfered in foreign relations, attempting to forestall war. The meat of the book doesn’t arrive until halfway through, during the duke’s stay in Spain and Portugal in 1940 on the way to his gubernatorial term in the Bahamas. Under Operation Willi, Germany planned to install Edward as a puppet dictator after England’s defeat, which nearly occurred as the British were evacuating Dunkirk. Edward was surely aware of the plan. He was indiscreet, irresponsible, defeatist, childish and naïve. Days before the end of the war, copies of communications among the Germans, Spanish and the Windsors were discovered in the Russian zone and quickly spirited away by the British. This evidence of his clear knowledge of the plan would have done irreparable damage to the British monarchy.
Morton insists that Edward never really wanted to be king and implies that Simpson never wanted to marry him. A better book would begin in Spain and focus on the damning papers, saving readers all the silly bits and innuendo of Simpson’s affairs.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2711-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
HISTORY | MODERN | 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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