A proficient, well-wrought work that emphasizes the actual fighting men, their deeds, and their fates. A good complement to...
Thorough research into the American military’s special arm for guerrilla warfare, which helped undermine the Axis effort during World War II.
In this valuable study, Lulushi (Operation Valuable Fiend: The CIA's First Paramilitary Strike Against the Iron Curtain, 2014, etc.) finds harrowing and inspiring incidences of both bravery and recklessness among the special forces arm of the wartime precursor to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services. The guerrilla arm, called Operational Groups Command, was inspired by the British Commandos under the Special Operations Executive, which had in turn been instigated upon the successful use of the German K-Truppen (combat troops)—these soldiers operated independently from the regular army and provided a key strategic advantage in the Nazi military campaigns at the beginning of the war. As head of the OSS, which was a civilian agency placed under the Joint Chiefs of Staff (amid much controversy in the War Department), William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a World War I hero and friend of President Franklin Roosevelt, created the Operational Groups Command to collect intelligence and to aid the partisan and resistance groups in enemy-controlled areas. The trial run of the OSS was Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa under Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s leadership in November 1942. In these and subsequent maneuvers in Italy and the western Mediterranean, the special foreign language–speaking soldiers, trained in commando tactics, parachuted into enemy-occupied territory and became valuable tools in harassing the enemy and in bolstering support of local resistance groups. Lulushi ably delineates these specific campaigns, from Corsica to Vercors, France, to the Balkans, and focuses on the appalling treatment of POWs by the Germans—e.g., the capture of the 15-man Ginny mission in Genoa-La Spezia in February 1944.
A proficient, well-wrought work that emphasizes the actual fighting men, their deeds, and their fates. A good complement to Douglas Waller’s Wild Bill Donovan (2011).Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62872-567-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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