by Gary Sterne ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 2014
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
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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