There’s not much news here, but fans of Sharpe, Aubrey, Bezukhov, and the like will appreciate Zamoyski’s vivid...
In which the famed French emperor seals his doom by marching headlong into a country that would not be tamed.
Polish historian Zamoyski (Holy Madness, 2000, etc.) has an eye for irony, and though he does not specifically point out parallels, the French invasion of Russia in 1812 finds echoes in current events. His aides warned Napoleon not to invade, fearing that while the French army was distracted, subject states across Europe would take the occasion to revolt. Alexander, the Russian tsar, had warned a French diplomat that “if it came to war he would go on fighting, in the depths of Russia if necessary, and would never sign a peace dictated to him in his capital,” and it was evident before the war began that partisan forces and the weather could combine to do more damage than any Russian army. Still, Napoleon decided to take the battle to Russia, citing threats that did not appear to have much basis in fact. He must have thought he could beat the Russian army, which was made up of mostly non-Russian officers commanding a force of men who were all but serfs under arms: as Zamoyski writes with characteristic attention to detail, a Russian private’s enlistment term was for 25 years, and his family was likely to write him off as dead the moment the induction notice came; whenever possible, it seemed, Russian soldiers deserted by the drove. Yet the Russians stood and fought, as they always did when their homeland was threatened; as Zamoyski writes, the Battle of Borodino alone was “the greatest massacre in recorded history, not to be surpassed until the first day of the Somme in 1916.” And then there was the winter, of course, which trimmed the French army logarithmically even as Napoleon decided to resort to Plan B: “He resolved to hasten back to Paris, where he would raise a new army in time to sally forth in the spring and not only reassert his control over central Europe but also defeat the Russians.”
There’s not much news here, but fans of Sharpe, Aubrey, Bezukhov, and the like will appreciate Zamoyski’s vivid reconstruction of events.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-107558-2
Page Count: 672
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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