At once accessible, concise, and comprehensive: a masterful overview of WW II. Drawing on previously unavailable archives as well as standard sources, historian Weinberg (Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany, etc.; Univ. of North Carolina) begins his chronicle of the great conflict with an analysis of the post-WW I events that led to a second world war. Getting down to business, he documents the fundamentally different intentions of latter-day belligerents like the Axis partners, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan, whose objectives encompassed a total reordering of territory, resources, and populations, while by contrast their WW I counterparts had fought mainly to preserve traditional balances of power. In pursuing his enormous theme, the author focuses on the strategic why rather than the tactical how of major clashes, leaving the details of such landmark engagements as the Battle of Britain to others with less lofty ambitions. This isn't to say that Weinberg shortchanges his readers in any substantive way. In addition to assessing the global implications of big-picture campaigns, for example, he offers short-take perspectives on action in hitherto neglected theaters. Cases in point range from the Allied seizure (from the Vichy French) of Madagascar on to so-called sideshows in Burma, Eastern Africa, and Iraq. Covered as well are the roles played by intelligence operatives, diplomats, Wehrmacht bureaucrats responsible for the Holocaust, civilians in scores of countries, and scientists recruited to develop the atomic bombs that helped hasten V-J Day. Weinberg's chronological narrative occasionally verges on the kaleidoscopic, but, this cavil apart, the author offers an authoritative survey of a huge conflict that, he suggests in an affecting afterword, might just have saved a weary world from even more destructive hostilities. The text has over 20 helpful maps. (Book-of-the-Month Dual Selection for March; Main Selection of the History Book Club)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-521-44317-2
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
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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