In the hands of a skillful historian like Ziegler, the reader emerges from this account of London's wartime experiences in at least as benevolent a spirit as the Londoner sweeping away debris at the height of the blitz who remarked that ``if that feller 'Itler keeps on like this, 'e'll get 'isself disliked''. Ziegler (King Edward VIII, 1991, etc.) does not tell us anything very new or modify our perceptions much, but he has the gift of using contemporary records, diaries, letters, and newspapers to tell hundreds of little stories that illustrate the mood and experiences of a people at war. He writes, for example, of the Reverend A. Halfpenny, a parson in Clapham, who was so carried away by his owm sermon that he did not hear the air-raid siren; his audience, who did hear it, shuffled uneasily in their pews but stuck it out. Ziegler also gives us a greater appreciation of the British capital's importance: At that time it was the greatest city in the world and the most populous, with the City of London financing more than half the world's international trade. London had previous experience of aerial warfare, during WW I, which killed only 690 people but had a great psychological impact. In WW II, there were 147,000 fatal or serious casualties in the British Isles during the whole war, 80,000 in London. Eighty thousand buildings were wrecked beyond repair, 700,000 suffered more than minor damage. While Ziegler notes that every story of courage could be matched by one of selfishness, he still comes down on the side of the generally accepted interpretation: that ``no one looking back on those dreadful years can doubt that the test had been passed with honor.'' As good a history as we are likely to see of what it meant to be alive in London during the war. (32 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 24, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43298-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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