A comprehensive, insightful one-volume study of World War II that relentlessly pursues the question: Why didn’t the Axis win?
British historian Roberts (Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945, 2009, etc.) captures the vigorous momentum undertaken by Hitler when it seemed to the world that the Nazi engine could not be stopped. Hitler was a devout student of military history, and the use of tactical surprise was carried out with repeated stunning success. Yet—and here Roberts returns frequently—there were crucial mistakes: Hitler’s halt order given at Dunkirk on May 24, 1940, allowed the British Army to flee by sea; his inability to “grasp the fundamental principles of air warfare” over the English Channel led to the defeat in the Battle of Britain; he departed from the strategic principle of “concentration” by embarking on a two-front war; he resolved to invade Russia, despite the historical evidence of this folly and the reservations of his own general, in order to fulfill the Nazi worldview; and the subsequent harsh treatment of the captured ethnic groups in Russia sealed resistance to the Nazis. In the excellent chapter titled “The Everlasting Shame of Mankind,” Roberts cogently analyzes the Nazi policy and system of extermination. Other important chapters treat the “Tokyo Typhoon,” and battles at Midway, El Alamein, Stalingrad and Sicily; the cracking of the Enigma code; and the controversial uses by the Allies of carpet bombing and the atomic bomb. The author masterly shows how the Allied victory was never assured, while the Nazi defeat was the result, first and foremost, of its pernicious ideology. An energetic, elegant synthesis of enormous research—with lots of maps!—that will prove a valuable resource for students of European history.
Pub Date: May 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-122859-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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