Military buffs will turn up their noses at this well-written but unnecessary book, and beginners will be confused by the...
Despite the title, this is not a coherent history but rather isolated, generously illustrated accounts of battles from ancient Egypt to the present day.
Collections of battle descriptions are one of the most lowbrow forms of military history, and readers will wonder why prolific and respected author Overy (History/Univ. of Exeter; The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945, 2014) chose such a moth-eaten genre. After a dozen-page introduction on the culture of battle (“Battle is not a game to plug into a computer but a piece of living history—messy, bloody and real. That…has not changed in 6,000 years”), he delivers two- to four-page chapters on his chosen 100 battles, divided into six categories. Readers must accept these on faith, although they do provide the author the opportunity to write six astute introductions. Thus, “leadership” characterizes Cannae, Hastings, Trafalgar and Kharkov under, respectively, Hannibal, William the Conqueror, Nelson and Von Manstein. Generals Marlborough, Custer, Washington and Eisenhower certainly possessed leadership qualities, but Overy has no doubt that Blenheim, Little Big Horn, Yorktown and the invasion of Normandy were examples of “deception.” Readers curious to know the common features of Marathon, the Somme, Gettysburg and Stalingrad will learn that these demonstrated “courage in the face of fire.” Limiting himself to just three significant battles (Agincourt, Waterloo, the Somme), John Keegan wrote a classic, The Face of Battle (1976). Entire volumes have covered a single significant battle, and Wikipedia often does a superior job explaining the obscure and unknown.
Military buffs will turn up their noses at this well-written but unnecessary book, and beginners will be confused by the sketchy historical background and absence of maps. The illustrations are little help since they are mostly portraits of leaders or artists’ renderings of battles, vivid but purely imaginary.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0199390717
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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