Students of WWII, especially of its diplomatic and geopolitical aspects, will want to have a look.
Fighting fascism is hard. Fighting it while arguing who’s in charge of the struggle only makes things harder.
Multinational military coalitions have been around since the time of the Peloponnesian War, Canadian military historians Bercuson and Herwig write. But WWII imposed requirements of a novel sort on the coalition that formed between Britain and the U.S.; both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt knew that “Allied victory would demand that their two nations fight virtually as one,” and that forging this unity both on the battlefield and in the production of war materiel was essential. Over a ten-day period around Christmas 1941, the two met in Washington to lay the foundations for what Churchill would dub “the grand alliance.” Although the two liked each other and shared a highly developed understanding of world politics, their work was complicated by their accompanying retinues, among whose ranks were an American admiral who despised the British and a British air marshal who insisted that American air forces be put under British command. Hammering out logistical details was one problem; Bercuson and Herwig slyly note that supplying Churchill with his vast daily alcohol requirements exhausted the White House booze allowance and required dipping into State Department funds. Determining a workable chain of military command was another; interestingly, we learn, Roosevelt initially recommended that a British general be put in charge of the combined American, British and Dutch forces who made up the first iteration of the Allies. He did so knowing that friction among Commonwealth leaders made an American commander the better choice, information he likely acquired “through American interception and decrypting of British diplomatic radio traffic.” Espionage aside, among the highlights of this account is its look at the Allied leaders’ timetable for the war, which matched historical events closely in many respects—but also departed from them significantly.
Students of WWII, especially of its diplomatic and geopolitical aspects, will want to have a look.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-403-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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