A glut of information impedes a view of the forest for the many trees.
A revision and amplification of the position of German defensive battlements on the Normandy beaches widens and deepens the questions surrounding the Overlord operation.
Sterne, who lives part of the year in the Normandy area, collects war antiques and is co-founder of Skirmish and Armourer magazines, sets out discoveries of a vast, previously unknown underground German battery and bunker system beneath Maisy, Normandy, assaulted by the Rangers in their push inland on June 6, 1944. As the author argues, the Rangers broke out from the beaches and were headed for the Pointe du Hoc big guns, only to discover that the guns had been moved and were not there—a failure perhaps of U.S. intelligence. The Maisy battery was two miles from the coast yet had an ideal vista to the sea. Indeed, it was a fully operational underground trench system, containing lethal howitzers, as well as barracks and a telephone shelter that had all been built by increments over the years of German occupation. Sterne has done extensive research into the German operations at Maisy, as well as what Allied intelligence knew or did not know about it. The actual battle to take the mazelike battery was arduous and took a heavy toll on the Rangers. Sterne aims to correct misconceptions around “D-Day myths”—e.g., that the Pointe du Hoc guns were operational rather than dummy positions to detract from the real emplacements at Maisy, as engineered by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Sterne believes that the 5th Rangers have not been properly recognized along with the 2nd in taking the battery, and he presents his evidence in numerous, abrupt switches among the points of view of the soldiers involved. Pictures and maps also vie for the reader’s attention.
A glut of information impedes a view of the forest for the many trees.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62914-327-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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 Yorkerstaff 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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