Persico shines some light on the shadowy activities that helped the Allies achieve some of their most significant victories....
A historian argues that FDR’s fascination and talent with intelligence helped make him an effective commander-in-chief during WWII.
Persico (Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, 1994, etc.) is a Roosevelt partisan, so his text can be tendentious (FDR’s decisions are invariably correct, his rare personal failures eminently understandable—and, more forgivable, his talents unsurpassed). But Persico fills a void in WWII histories by focusing on the intelligence aspects of most of the war’s major events. He begins, of course, with Pearl Harbor, which he calls “the most stunning failure of intelligence in the country’s history, likely in the history of warfare” (the Trojan Horse excepted?). Persico argues forcefully that neither FDR nor Winston Churchill knew of the raid in advance, despite the chain of evidence that suggests they could have. Persico charts the various rises and falls of J. Edgar Hoover and the OSS’s William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan (whose successes in espionage were scattered among some daffy proposals—e.g., dropping myriad bats over Japan in the hopes that the winged creatures would terrify the populace). Persico reveals that FDR was convinced that Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi and that Churchill did not conceal any knowledge of an imminent Luftwaffe raid on Coventry to prevent the Nazis from concluding that the British had cracked the German Enigma code. He reminds us that the US rounded up and detained about 20,000 German- and Italian-Americans in addition to the 114,000 Japanese-Americans. He tells the stories of the abortive attempts by the Nazis to land spies in the US—and of the more successful USSR penetration of the Manhattan Project, from which the Soviets stole 10,000 pages of information, enough to enable them to construct their own atomic bomb. Persico twice supports FDR’s decision to do nothing dramatic to rescue Jews from the Holocaust: winning the war was the best strategy, he says.
Persico shines some light on the shadowy activities that helped the Allies achieve some of their most significant victories. (16 pages b&w illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50246-7
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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