A flawed look at Mussolini’s diplomacy. This is an American edition of a work published last year in Great Britain. Lamb’s controversial thesis: that until the mid-1930s, Mussolini was undecided whether to support Nazi Germany or Great Britain in the inevitable war on the horizon. Lamb (Churchill as War Leader, 1993, etc.) here enters the territory of revisionist history. Most scholars, examining Mussolini’s and Hitler’s respective ideologies, have concluded that Fascist Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany was inevitable and preordained. Lamb is only partially correct in pointing out that Mussolini was not slavishly tied to any ideology; indeed Mussolini in the 1920s boasted that fascism had no ideology. But this is a misreading. Lamb himself recognizes that Mussolini was quite able to say one thing on Monday and the opposite on Tuesday, but he reads Mussolini’s courtship of Britain as earnest fascist foreign policy rather than cynical maneuvering. Lamb contends that a golden opportunity to divorce Mussolini from Hitler’s fatal embrace was lost by Anthony Eden; Eden, according to Lamb, felt that Hitler was a man with whom the British “could do business,” while Mussolini was no more than a common gangster. He was wrong on both counts. That Lamb is essentially correct in condemning Eden and much of the British Foreign Office does not prove his thesis. A curious aside is Lamb’s contention, based on a previously published work (Mussolini’s Other Woman) that the Jewish intellectual and patron of the arts, Margherita Sarfatti, influenced his foreign policy and early distrust of Hitler. Although there is no denying the tense relationship between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Lamb’s thesis requires a selective reading of the evidence and a failure to address ideology. It is doubtful that Mussolini ever seriously considered entering the war against Hitler; it was more a question of when and how to enter the war at his side as an equal partner. Revisionist history that fails to revise. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1999
ISBN: 0-88064-244-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
