Successful niche military history for a popular audience.
Fireworks in Nazi-occupied Italy during the final year of World War II.
Prolific filmmaker and historian Lewis has written many accounts of commando derring-do across various historical eras. His current effort begins in the fall of 1944, one year into the Italian campaign. After months of slow, bitter advance up the peninsula, the Allies were stalled at the Gothic line, a heavily fortified position north of Florence. On the bright side, resistance forces in North Italy were perhaps the most effective in Europe. Fortified by air drops of supplies, arms, and members of Britain’s elite Special Air Service, they became a major thorn in the side of the German occupation. Lewis builds his story around Roy Farran and Michael Lees, two veteran British officers, describing their dramatic, if not always successful exploits in the years before they came together for Operation Tombola. Ordinarily resistance units confined themselves to acts of sabotage and ambush, but on this occasion, they received approval to target a corps headquarters housed in two well-defended villas. Lewis delivers his usual vivid account of the planning and fierce March 1945 attack, which included 50 British soldiers dropped in for the occasion and several hundred partisans including a company of Russian escaped POWs. It was largely successful, destroying the villas and causing substantial German casualties at the expense of two British dead. The operation has been called “possibly the most significant single action involving partisans in the entire history of the partisan movement.” Readers may wince at some of the author’s purple novelization in which historical characters talk, think, and reveal their emotions, but they will forgive him because he has turned up a little-known behind-the-lines spectacular led by two heroic British officers.
Successful niche military history for a popular audience.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8065-4074-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD
BOOK REVIEW
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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