An eye-opening study, in keeping with the best of John Keegan, S.L.A. Marshall and B.H. Liddell Hart.
Comprehensive study of the battle of 1916 that would kill and wound a million combatants.
Since the 1960s, writes Hart, director and oral historian of London’s Imperial War Museum, the Battle of the Somme has solidified in the popular imagination as a byword for senseless trench warfare commanded by generals who thought nothing of sacrificing soldiers by the battalion. There is truth in that view, but a “more sympathetic perspective” allows that the British commanders, particularly Sir Douglas Haig, believed that war by attrition was the only way they could wear down the huge German army on the Western Front. That soldiers were arrayed in trenches thousands of miles long was an outgrowth, Hart observes, of the British government’s abandonment of a strategy that many imperial servants would have preferred, namely to keep to the high seas and prey on German shipping and German colonies, avoiding at any cost a continental land war. Couple that with Haig’s view that any decision was better than no decision and any action better than inaction, as well as his recognition that defeating Germany was a matter of steadily improving the Allied position, and carnage was bound to ensue. It certainly did. On the first day of the battle, Haig’s forces suffered 54,470 casualties, “the worst disaster ever to have befallen the British Army in its entire history.” The battle saw numerous innovations, including the first—albeit ineffective—use of tanks and a regime of walking artillery fire that left the fields of France full of metal that is still grinding plows today. Remarked a British soldier of one particularly savage corner of the fighting, “I wonder what the people at home who say, ‘We will fight to our last drop of blood!’ would think if they were taken up that trench. For 500 yards it is paved with English dead.” Yet the war would continue for almost two more years, with millions of dead to follow.
An eye-opening study, in keeping with the best of John Keegan, S.L.A. Marshall and B.H. Liddell Hart.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-016-4
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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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