Lively, densely detailed and unabashedly enthusiastic.
Writing with the flair of a novelist, Cherny (The Next Deal: The Future of Public Life in the Information Age, 2000) tells the story of the Berlin Airlift.
The author sets the scene with the dramatic meeting of Russian and American troops at the banks of the Elbe on April 25, 1945. “The forces of liberation have joined hands,” announced the BBC; only Berlin remained to be subdued to end the war in Europe. The Red Army was first into the bombed-out city, which it vengefully pillaged and raped. Within three years, the Soviet Union had methodically expanded its hegemony in Eastern Europe, and relations with America were dangerously strained. In Berlin, the Russians manipulated elections in their sector and rejected the Western currency. Closing entrances into the American, British and French sectors of the city on June 25, 1948, the Soviets hoped to push out the West for good, in the process consigning 2.5 million Berliners to starvation. The U.S. airlift of coal and food into Tempelhof was initially intended to buy time during the standoff, but over the course of 11 months Operation Vittles would employ an armada of Skymaster C-54s and deliver millions of tons of cargo. Cherny dramatically weaves together the conjoined fates of numerous characters: Gen. Lucius Clay, newly appointed head of military government of Germany; Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and his nemesis, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, who ran against Truman in 1948; Col. Frank Howley, instrumental in managing the airlift; and pilots Curtis LeMay, Bill Tunner and Gail Halvorsen, the last-named celebrated for dropping little parachutes of candy for Berlin children. The author skillfully delineates the airlift’s role in dramatically improving Germans’ and Americans’ attitudes toward each other, with significant consequences for the Cold War. His account amplifies and vivifies material presented in a more bare-bones fashion by Jon Sutherland and Diane Canwell in Berlin Airlift: The Salvation of a City (2008).
Lively, densely detailed and unabashedly enthusiastic.Pub Date: April 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15496-6
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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
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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