An excellent book refreshingly unlike most tedious, confusing war stories. Jennings brings his easy journalistic style and...
Journalist and war correspondent Jennings (Bosnia's Million Bones: Solving the World's Greatest Forensic Puzzle, 2013, etc.) chronicles the World War II battles in Italy in 1944 and 1945.
Laced through the story are the viewpoints of fascinating individuals involved in the fighting. At the same time, the author gives us a broad overview, reporting battle details clearly and providing vivid descriptions of the impenetrable German line. Trying to drive the Germans out of Italy was the job of a truly diverse army. There were soldiers from India, America, Brazil, New Zealand, Poland, and Canada. They were arrayed against the Gothic Line, which ran from Rimini on the east coast to Carrara on the west. The German army, under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, had escaped the fighting in the south because American Gen. Mark Clark decided the glory of liberating Rome was more important than cutting off the German army. Kesselring made potent use of Italy’s geography to dig into the mountains and set up minefields, and he even buried tank turrets as bunkers. The Allies split into three units to move up the center of the line to Bologna, in the west toward the Tuscan coast, and in the Adriatic toward Ravenna. Ready to attack, the Allies were suddenly ordered to divert some divisions to the invasion at Nice, a move that took all pressure off Hitler, gave Stalin free rein in his westward push, and guaranteed that the fight for the Gothic Line would be bloody. The struggle seemed never-ending. The author takes to task those generals who ignored orders, causing extended fighting and untold deaths. He also includes a helpful section at the end, “What Became of the Characters in the Book.”
An excellent book refreshingly unlike most tedious, confusing war stories. Jennings brings his easy journalistic style and thorough fact finding to one of the most desperate conflicts of the war, teaching us how war stories should be written.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-06517-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 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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