Costigliola provides engaging pick-and-choose historical highlights rather than a fluent narrative.
A meandering mishmash of biography and history delves into the personalities of World War II’s Grand Alliance—especially its “fulcrum,” FDR.
Roosevelt kept the three Allies working together to fend off the Nazi menace, balancing the tenacity of Churchill with the ruthlessness of Stalin by sheer dint of Roosevelt’s magnetic personality. Yet by FDR’s death in 1945 the alliance cracked, and President Truman, no friend of the Soviets, allowed the prevailing suspicions among the three to undermine the postwar relationships and usher in the Cold War. In this sometimes entertaining but thematically flailing work, Costigliola (History/Univ. of Connecticut; France and the United States: The Cold Alliance Since World War II, 1992, etc.) casts among the diplomatic players that contributed both to the success of the Grand Alliance and its unraveling. The author compares the background and schooling of the three—e.g., the privileged aristocracies of Churchill and Roosevelt versus the hardscrabble working-class upbringing of Stalin and the varying degrees of parental love (e.g., Stalin was brutalized by his father, while Roosevelt was doted upon by his mother) as having affected their respective leadership styles. In particular, Costigliola traces the indispensable working friendship between Roosevelt and Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, who became “in effect his chief-of-staff,” and Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, a man of action who moved into the White House during the war years so that he could be at Roosevelt’s disposal. Both Churchill and Stalin, likewise suffering ill health due to the pressures of war, had their long-suffering assistants, while Stalin had his “political club,” who adored their leader but felt abused by the purges, and grew resentful. All worked their personal touch at conferences such as Yalta and Tehran. With Roosevelt’s death, relations with the Soviets were dominated by issues around the atomic bomb, and alarmist policies over Soviet intentions fueled perilous mutual distrust.
Costigliola provides engaging pick-and-choose historical highlights rather than a fluent narrative.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-691-12129-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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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