by William Philpott ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2010
A knowledgeable, all-encompassing dissection of this supreme example of “the consummate killing power of the machine age.”
A staggeringly comprehensive look at the significant battles of the River Somme during World War I.
Philpott (Military History/King’s Coll., London) brushes aside traditional mythmaking by Winston Churchill and Basil Liddell Hart for a fresh appraisal of this four-year “massacre of the innocents” in the northwest French countryside. Deemed a national tragedy for the British, the author calls it “a victory, if an unappreciated one.” Although the Battle of the Somme usually signified the massive Entente offensive of 1916, the engagement of the three big armies—France, Germany and Britain—actually occurred several times over four years, from September 1914 to August 1918, and ensued largely as a battle of attrition. After initial engagements between the French and the Germans in the summer of 1914 across the frontiers, the French dug in at the Somme. Napoleonic-style fighting—openly advancing formations—was abandoned in favor of trench warfare and hand-to-hand combat, and the “war of flesh was going to become a war of steel, of weaponry and machinery, science and technology” The British imperial army, led by Secretary of War Lord Kitchener and commander-in-chief Douglas Haig, was “something of a wild card” when it reached the Somme, and it was prodded into action by the erosion of the French reserves at Verdun. In contrast, the Kaiser’s army was at the top of its game, and only “a breakdown in German morale” could precipitate its defeat, which the French and British delivered in a coordinated strategy by 1916. Moreover, full mobilization at home was expanded, the war arsenal was replenished—the British employed tanks for the first time in battle, with mixed success—and a long, slow slog against the Germans prevailed. Philpott does a fine job of dovetailing comparative sources in this impressive account.
A knowledgeable, all-encompassing dissection of this supreme example of “the consummate killing power of the machine age.”Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26585-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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