A magisterial, commanding, and immensely thought-provoking history.
Veteran British journalist and historian Hastings (Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45, 2008, etc.) provides fresh, exciting insights into Winston Churchill’s wartime leadership.
When Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, the Nazi war machine had swept aside the British in Norway and were headed for France. The time for talk of appeasement and defeatism had passed. “I felt as if I were walking with destiny,” Churchill said later, “and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.” Marshalling an enormous wealth of sources and writing in beautifully lucid prose, Hastings emphasizes how the prime minister stood alone amid the panic and incredulity of the British nation, and that over the first decisive year of the war he had to prove himself as a leader and a warrior. He did—by his ringing rhetoric, powerful character and unflagging determination that the island nation could prevail. The author focuses on Churchill’s relationship with his generals and chiefs of staff as well as the British public through the major events of these wartime years: the early evacuation of British troops at Dunkirk (saving hundreds of thousands from assured annihilation); the Battle of Britain, waged in fighter planes over the Channel and London skies; the campaigns in Greece, the Aegean, Italy and Northern Africa; the aid to Russia, staving off Nazi siege and invasion; and the courting of President Roosevelt. Hastings encompasses viewpoints by other Churchill scholars, such as Roy Jenkins and David Reynolds, and delves into the archives of cultural history for some touchy revelations—specifically regarding the general disappointment in the British soldiers’ fighting spirit and the feeling that the United States should have been lending support (one British charity worker said that “Pearl Harbor served Americans right”). The indomitable character of Churchill comes alive on these pages, and Hastings forces the reader to ponder how the war might have turned out had the stalwart leader not been at the helm.
A magisterial, commanding, and immensely thought-provoking history.Pub Date: April 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26839-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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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