WW II historian Smith (The Ultra-Magic Deals, 1992, etc.) persuasively argues (contrary to the consensus that Stalin and his Western allies were standoffish partners) that sharing of wartime intelligence between the Anglo-Americans and Soviets was extensive and that it continued until the very last days of the war. When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in June 1941, the outlook for Russo-British cooperation seemed inauspicious. After all, Britain had directed an international military campaign against the nascent Soviet regime in the years following the Russian Revolution. The US was so anti- Soviet that it did not recognize the USSR until 1935. Meanwhile Stalin, himself xenophobic, dismissed British warnings of an imminent Nazi invasion as part of a Western plot against Russia. However, Smith shows that despite a mutual abiding mistrust, the ideological adversaries were compelled to share secrets by the exigencies of war and a demand for anti-Nazi intelligence that outstripped the lone resources of the USSR or England. Even before US entry into the war Harry Hopkins, FDR's personal envoy, helped cement a working relationship among the Allies with intelligence sharing and equipment grants. Despite frequent personality clashes with the more secretive Soviets and conflicts over the appropriateness of sharing sensitive data, the Anglo-Americans shared secrets ranging from estimates of German and Japanese war strategy and materiel to intercepts from America's MAGIC program, which read Japanese codes. While the US was warier of Soviet intentions than Britain in the early stages of the partnership, Smith contends, by war's end the US had become an enthusiastic sharer of intelligence and, hoping to involve the Soviet Union in war against Japan, was giving high-level secret information to the Soviets as late as August 1945. Although compelled by lack of access to Soviet files to base his account almost solely on Anglo-American sources, Smith gives a richly detailed and well-researched contribution to the literature on WW II intelligence.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1996
ISBN: 0-7006-0800-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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