by Jonathan W. Jordan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2011
A masterly, exciting study of character and tactics in World War II.
An inspired collective biography of the three American generals—and friends—who conquered the Nazis.
Born too late to be involved in World War I, these three soldiers—Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton and Omar Bradley—all graduates of West Point, were plunged into the quagmire of World War II by their 50s, and they took up the challenge with relish. When Gen. George C. Marshall was named the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff in 1939, he maneuvered the three talented career officers to plum positions, though it was Eisenhower’s appointment as Commanding General, European Theater of Operations, in 1942, that would determine the fates of the other two. Eisenhower was the master planner, while his longtime friend Patton, a cocky patrician with a penchant for tanks and profanity, proved his striker—the Stonewall Jackson to his Robert E. Lee, as Patton had joked. Gen. Bradley, the tall, quiet Missourian, an instructor of math and tactics, was the last to be called overseas, sent to work with Patton in North Africa; he would eventually take over Patton’s II Corps to brilliant effect. Patton, meanwhile, begrudged Eisenhower’s insistence on moving in tandem with the Allies, and suspected he was pro-British, while Eisenhower and Bradley were frequently enraged by Patton’s blustery, precipitous style, especially during the conquest of Sicily. A master assault general, however, Patton was Eisenhower’s heavy hitter in the Operation Overlord amphibious invasion of 1944. Ably marshalling a considerable amount of research, Jordan (Lone Star Navy: Texas, the Fight for the Gulf of Mexico, and the Shaping of the American West, 2005, etc.) fashions a truly compelling narrative of three outsized American military figures.
A masterly, exciting study of character and tactics in World War II.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-451-23212-0
Page Count: 672
Publisher: NAL Caliber/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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