A must-read for students of military history.
Why wars are won not in a single decisive battle but over the long haul.
At the outset of this sweeping history of Western warfare, Nolan (History/Boston Univ.; Wars of the Age of Louis XIV, 1650-1715, 2008, etc.) notes that the outcomes of great battles by no means guarantee victory in the war as a whole. Hannibal’s win over the Roman legion at Cannae—a battle that became a model for generations of subsequent commanders—did little to avert Rome’s final conquest and destruction of Carthage. Significantly, Rome won the war by a policy of attrition, a strategy that Nolan finds has been far more effective over the millennia than the more glamorous set piece battles that historians so admire. The idea of a quick knockout has a special appeal to states looking to take on a stronger adversary, and there are enough historical examples of the strategy succeeding to raise the hopes of those tempted to try it. Beginning with the Thirty Years’ War, readers get full-scale analyses of the great commanders’ careers, with due attention to the geopolitical context of their wars. Particularly after the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, war began to involve significant parts of the populations of the nations involved. Napoleon, who became the model to whom generals looked for inspiration for at least a century, also illustrates Nolan’s central theme: whatever his genius for battle, Napoleon was finally ground down by a coalition of major powers that refused to fold after a defeat. The theme takes on new meaning with the two great 20th-century wars, in which initial successes were not enough to ensure victory to the aggressors. Nolan also looks to more recent asymmetric wars, where small nations wear out great power aggressors by a strategy of attrition. His focus on Europe may disappoint readers who would like more on American wars, and there is some repetition. Nonetheless, this is one of the most valuable military histories in years.
A must-read for students of military history.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-538378-2
Page Count: 664
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | 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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