A strong contribution to the literature of WWII, from an accomplished student of the era.
A well-conceived study of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Normandy in 1944, focusing on the more or less ordinary people who participated in that great battle.
Most of Stafford’s (Spies Beneath Berlin, 2003, etc.) ten subjects were, of course, far from ordinary. In keeping with the author’s interest in espionage, some are freedom fighters, members of the French and Norwegian resistance underground, and even secret agents; one is a British Wren, a member of the women’s naval corps, whose top-secret job it was to decode ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore signals. Others, German and Allied, are the soldiers who fought it out on the shores of France. By Stafford’s account, just about everyone had some inkling that the great battle was coming; it was by a stroke of very good fortune that the Nazis did not have detailed foreknowledge of the invasion, though for some time the Allies had been enforcing strict security measures—Churchill himself ordered that those measures be “high, wide, and handsome”—to protect the invasion force. Stafford’s representative German enlisted man suspects something is up when all leave is canceled, while Hitler himself remarks to the Japanese ambassador to the Third Reich that the Allies are planning to “establish a bridgehead in Normandy or Brittany and, after seeing how things went, would then embark upon the establishment of a real second front in the Channel.” Back in England, writes Stafford, ordinary folks sense something’s up when the streets, shops, and movie houses are suddenly emptied of soldiers: “The crowds were a lot thinner, taxis were now easier to find, and the streets felt quieter, even subdued.” Much of Stafford’s narrative is a buildup to the big event, which has disastrous consequences for some of his actors—Erwin Rommel on one side, a Canadian rifleman named Glenn Dickin on the other—even as they and others perform heroically against the odds.
A strong contribution to the literature of WWII, from an accomplished student of the era.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-60561-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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