Exciting OSS/Serbo-Croatian adventure circa 1944, by Lindsay (Associate/Harvard's Center for International Affairs). Respectfully introduced by John Kenneth Galbraith, Lindsay's memoir preserves in well-crafted prose a legendary period, proving beyond doubt that Donovan's Daredevils were not all Ivy League triflers. A young engineer with a smattering of useful languages, the author talked himself into an assignment that began with parachuting into Yugoslavia to work with Tito's partisans and led to a hardscrabble existence that lost novelty but never danger. In precise, well-remembered detail, supported by archives and some thousand pages of radio dispatches, Lindsay presents the daily complexities of the assignment. Working with Communists, plagued by irregular supply drops, dependent on cranky radios that required large batteries, pursued by ever-efficient German intelligence and military units, saddled with inept local explosives ``experts,'' and subsisting on anything from horse meat to dough-balls, he blew up major bridges and tunnels, was nearly blown up himself, and lived a life that, as told here, is half For Whom the Bell Tolls and half Lawrence of Arabia. Especially clear is the element of human error (usually born of nationalism and compounded by bureaucracy): At one point, such error causes the partial failure of what could have been a brilliant mission; at another, it results in the loss of two British supply planes. Lindsay also presents a lucid picture of local customs, personalities, and nationalities, as well as of the Nazi exploitation of ethnic enmities that are unchanged to this day. Nor is he without humor, as in his account of a riding lesson interrupted by a randy stallion. An impressive document that will interest WW II buffs, historians, and anyone who likes a tale of hands-on derring-do.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8047-2123-8
Page Count: 407
Publisher: Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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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