Savaged in its time for its unblinking portrait of an army destroyed piece by piece, this account should interest military...
A long-neglected memoir of the Russian campaign, first published four years after its protagonist’s death.
At the end of his life, Napoleon allowed that he had made three big errors: he should have made peace with England at the end of the Peninsular War, should have restored the Kingdom of Poland, and should never have tried to invade Russia. But invade Russia he did. When his Grand Army began its campaign against Tsar Alexander’s forces in 1812, it was half-a-million soldiers strong; so worked up were they at the prospect of trouncing the enemy that elements of the advance guard came to blows over who got to cross into Russia first. Only 10,000 French soldiers made it out of Russian territory just a few months later; the rest died of Russian bullets, starvation, or the awful cold of winter. De Ségur, a general in charge of logistics, was on hand to witness this slaughter and Napoleon’s foul moods; though no Tolstoy, he offers in these pages eyewitness accounts of such signal battles as Moscow and Borodino, which left the Grand Army “blackened with powder and spotted with blood; and yet, in the midst of their rags, their misery and disasters, they had a proud look; and at the sight of the Emperor, uttered some shouts of triumph; but they were rare and forced.” De Ségur, a proud patriot, takes care to portray his fellow soldiers as brave and selfless men, though he fully recognizes their all too human frailties, as when the exhausted and fatigued infantry discovers “a spirit distilled from grain . . . used instead of wine and brandy made from grapes”—vodka, that is, which seems to have taken as many victims as shrapnel. He treats his ruler more circumspectly, but, reading between the lines, we find in his pages a Napoleon of rueful and uneasy countenance, stricken by disease and remorse, far from the stoical leader generally portrayed.
Savaged in its time for its unblinking portrait of an army destroyed piece by piece, this account should interest military historians greatly.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1174-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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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