Relying on correspondence, diaries, and interviews, Miller (The House of Getty, not reviewed) presents vivid first-person perspectives from British, German, and American combatants in the Allied invasion of Normandy. The greatest movement of men and materiel in history, the invasion was a grand strategic achievement that signaled the end of Hitler's ambitions in the West and the beginning of the final campaign of WW II. However, the ordinary soldiers, whether British, American, or German, saw little of the strategy; for them, ``D-Day was nothing but fear, confusion, noise, muddle, chaos, hysteria and horror interspersed with flashes of heroism and humor.'' Miller gives the impressions of British women and children interacting for the first time with ``Yanks'' and, on the other side of the English Channel, the thoughts of French civilians on the German occupiers; he lets British commandos tell of their reconnaissance missions to the Normandy beaches; and he relates the intelligence battles between the Allies and Germans and the sometimes cordial, sometimes tense relationships between British and American officers planning the invasion. Soldiers reminisce about the boredom and fear felt during the long wait, the 24-hour postponement of the battle, and the tense Channel crossing. Most compelling of all, however, is the terrifying story of the storming of the beaches—especially the nightmarish Omaha and Utah beaches, where American soldiers took fearful losses from German artillery before wiping out the German fortifications—and the Allied battle inland. After the landings, Miller records Allied confusion, as British and American soldiers tried to consolidate their victory, and German despair as both officers and soldiers began to realize the war was lost. Riveting soldier's-eye views of the deadly confusion of battle, and a significant contribution to military and D-day literature.
Pub Date: June 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-10209-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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