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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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