Berucson and Herwig add little to the big picture here, but the story of the Bismarck, the technical details of naval...
A retelling of the best news the British had apart from Pearl Harbor in the dismal year of 1941: the sinking of the fearsome German battleship Bismarck.
Canadian military historians Bercuson and Herwig (Deadly Seas, not reviewed, etc.) have supplemented the usual sources with newly opened diplomatic files. The result is the most detailed history yet of this dramatic episode. Even military buffs will be surprised to discover how flyblown and out-of-date the Royal Navy was after 20 years of neglect. Except for their radar, its warships were technologically inferior to Germany’s and even to those of France and Italy. The Bismarck was at once the largest and the fastest battleship in the world. Its maiden departure in May 1941 to raid Allied commerce galvanized the British navy. Dozens of ships gave chase. The first encounter was a disaster. Britain’s largest battleship, the Hood, was blown to bits, a second badly damaged. Ironically, the blow that doomed the Bismarck was delivered by an airplane that was as obsolete as much of the British fleet. A Royal Navy Swordfish, an ancient, open-cockpit biplane, and the Royal Navy’s torpedo bomber, disabled the Bismarck’s steering, allowing an overwhelming force to close in. Despite their thorough research, the authors do not examine the traditional assessment of the Battle of the Atlantic: that the Germans came within a whisker of winning. The truth is that U-boats plus commerce raiders like the Bismarck frightened the Allies and produced a long, bitter struggle. Yet the outcome was never in doubt: 99% of convoyed Allied merchant ships reached their destination.
Berucson and Herwig add little to the big picture here, but the story of the Bismarck, the technical details of naval warfare, and the biographies of the major participants remain endlessly fascinating. (21 illustrations, 3 maps)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-192-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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