You'll never think of WW II as ``the good war'' again after reading Ponting's catalogue of catastrophic mistakes and horrific atrocities committed by political and military leaders on all sides. In his ninth book, British historian Ponting (Univ. of Swansea, Wales; A Green History of the World, 1992, etc.) offers his own interpretation of the war's big issues. Eschewing military history, he instead provides weighty, chapter-length examinations of nine ``common themes'' and discusses ``how the various belligerents (and neutrals) responded to the common problems.'' This analysis leaves out individual personalities and battles and zeroes in on broad struggles, such as the homefront, the neutral nations, technology, overall strategy, civilians, and the effects of occupation and liberation. Ponting marshals plenty of evidence (all of which, unfortunately for the student of history, is unfootnoted) to show that the WW II ``was probably the most brutal war fought in modern times.'' The brunt of that brutality, he points out more than once, came on the eastern front during the almost unimaginatively murderous German invasion of the Soviet Union and the subsequent Russian counterattack. Ponting makes a strong case that ``the overwhelming importance of material superiority'' of the Allies was the key to the defeat of both Germany and Japan. In addition, the author offers several against- the-grain arguments, including his contention that Hitler's fatal invasion of Russia was ``highly logical''; that technological advances were not as decisive in the war's outcome as commonly believed; that the overwhelming majority of people in German and Japanese occupied countries were neither collaborators nor resisters; that the importance of anti-German resistance has been ``overemphasized''; and that liberation was not exactly liberating for the people in many Eastern European and Asian countries. A refreshingly unromantic view of a war that all too often is remembered in sanitized form.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43602-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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