A fine account of the Great War that deserves consideration alongside recent, more acclaimed studies.
An impressive historical debut that gazes behind time’s curtain at the startling, pivotal experiences of the American fighting men of WWI.
Financial Times journalist Mead swings for the fences in his self-proclaimed attempt to rescue the experience of the two million men who served in France and Russia in 1917–18 from an odd ahistorical perspective that undeniably awards more veneration to tales of more recent, resonant wars. It’s an extremely dense work, scrupulously researched, with efforts made to capture a vanished pre-1920s American idiom, which engrosses the reader despite some awkwardness of scale. Mead asserts that “without the Doughboys the Allies (Britain and France) would not have defeated the Central Powers”; yet he also explores the conflicts between the officers and aims of the American Expeditionary Force and those of their European allies, citing “tremendous antipathy” that resulted in privations for American soldiers, while their contributions were overlooked. Mead uses original sources, including doughboy journals, letters, and memoirs, which eloquently convey the unschooled early-century elegance of simple men hurled unsuspectingly into the abyss; although he evinces great respect for these men, a more acid tone creeps in when addressing the pompous founts of war fever among politicians, hack journalists, and munitions-makers holding Allied debts. Much narrative is devoted to crisp, hair-raising depictions of what awaited the American conscripts on the Western Front, seemingly with scrupulous attention to true military chronology. Yet Mead also evokes the major personalities behind the war, like General Pershing and his often irritating Allied counterparts, as well as the frosty, idealistic President Wilson. The author balances an essentially military history with perceptive portrayals of the war at home, examining the strangulation of civil liberties and the mob vengeance directed at naturalized Germans and war resisters; he also devotes sober discussion to the cruel lot of African-American doughboys, who found themselves excluded from the “freedom” they fought for, and whose valor was falsely impugned.
A fine account of the Great War that deserves consideration alongside recent, more acclaimed studies.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2000
ISBN: 1-58567-061-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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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