An intensely focused account that cuts through the battle’s sprawl and duration, supplying the general reader with an...
A military reporter examines the climax of “the longest and deadliest naval conflict in world history.”
Allied plans for a Britain-based amphibious assault on the European continent, not to mention the very survival of the United Kingdom, depended on unharried use of the North Atlantic’s shipping lanes, lifeline to the United States and its vast supplies. In March 1943, Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz suddenly stepped up the attacks of his deadly U-boats. Striking day or night, the German submarines posed a critical threat to the merchant convoys and, consequently, to the outcome of World War II. Offley (Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon, 2007, etc.) meticulously re-creates the terrifying U-boat assaults during this pivotal spring (generous appendices help the reader keep track of the chessboard) and explains how the Allies turned the tide of the years-long battle. Improved tactics (more escort warships, more Liberator bombers, a shift from merely fending off subs to aggressively pursuing them), advances in technology (sonar, ship-based radar, high-frequency direction finding, air-dropped acoustic homing torpedoes, air-to-surface rockets launched by carrier-based aircraft), command of the cryptologic conflict, breaking the German naval Enigma code, even the vagaries of the notoriously severe North Atlantic weather—all accounted for the permanent advantage the Allies finally seized. As he traces these developments, the author enlivens the narrative with telling detail: a glimpse of life aboard the cramped and foul U-boats, a sample of hortatory messages from Dönitz to his fleet, accounts of merchant mariners who survived the torpedoes, estimates by U-boat commanders that inflated their kills, decisions by rogue captains to abandon the convoys, the war-game results of a lowly Admiralty captain that persuaded Churchill to shift more resources to the Atlantic. The fight would continue for another two years, but with a hoped-for new generation of subs and weapons never materializing, the Germans could no longer contemplate victory.
An intensely focused account that cuts through the battle’s sprawl and duration, supplying the general reader with an appreciation of its character and importance.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-465-01397-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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