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CHURCHILL'S SHADOW RAIDERS

Name: CHURCHILL'S SHADOW RAIDERS
Author: Damien Lewis
ISBN: 978-0-8065-4063-4

THE RACE TO DEVELOP RADAR, WORLD WAR II'S INVISIBLE SECRET WEAPON

by Damien Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 28, 2020

Expert descriptions of behind-the-lines actions during WWII.

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An account of two British commando raids in the early part of World War II. Journalist and prolific popular historian Lewis—who has authored multiple books about the Special Air Service—devotes much of his latest to a February 1942 raid on the French coast to obtain an advanced German radar set. Unlike many elaborate WWII special operations, it succeeded, producing both a boost to civilian morale and genuinely useful information. Many accounts of the Battle of Britain leave the impression that the British invented radar, but Germans did so at the same time—and theirs was better. British leaders denied the possibility that Germany possessed the technology, even as the first British bomber missions were suffering heavy losses from surprisingly accurate anti-aircraft and fighter defenses; it took the efforts of energetic young engineers to change British leaders’ minds. By early 1942, with aerial photographs revealing a suspicious device with a parabolic dish antenna near the village of Bruneval, intelligence chiefs planned a raid to acquire it. The final 200 pages describe the planning, recruitment, training, and execution of the mission named Operation Biting, during which a company of airborne troops dropped into the area and fought their way to the radar station. After dismantling much of the set, they trundled it to the nearby beach, where, after the usual delays and mishaps, boats arrived to carry them to safety. In the first third of the book, Lewis describes Operation Colossus, a February 1941 raid that destroyed an Italian aqueduct. Although significant as the first operation of the newly formed elite SAS, it bears no relation to the Bruneval raid, but few readers will complain. Lewis has worked diligently with newly discovered material and delivers entertaining military history with only modest lowbrow novelization—e.g., invented dialogue, thoughts, etc. Expert descriptions of behind-the-lines actions during WWII.

Pub Date: April 28, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-8065-4063-4

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Citadel/Kensington

Review Posted Online: May 10, 2020

Categories:

HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | MILITARY | WORLD

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Awards & Accolades

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Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2017

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Award Finalist

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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Awards & Accolades

Likes

19

Our Verdict

GET IT

Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2017

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Award Finalist

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

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.