A capable, readable look at a little-known corner of history.
The war in Europe takes to the skies—on the wings of birds.
Courier pigeons are the stuff of World War I set pieces, but they were still useful two decades later. As BBC security correspondent Corera (Cyberspies: The Secret History of Surveillance, Hacking, and Digital Espionage, 2016, etc.) writes, “in 2011, Chinese state media announced that a special unit of the People’s Liberation Army was training pigeons to conduct ‘special military missions.’" In this lively story, the author focuses closely on a British operation called Operation Columba, which seeded mostly rural areas of occupied Western Europe with more than 16,000 homing pigeons. Some of the birds returned to British hands with accounts of life under Nazi rule, while others brought more substantial news of gun positions, troop movements, and the like. One principal was a chaplain to Belgium’s King Leopold, organizing a cell of pigeon fanciers dubbed Leopold Vindictive that caused the Nazis fits. Corera is a touch too generous with the details of just how the birds did their work; one page he devotes to a pigeon’s transit could be distilled to a couple of sentences. Still, there’s undeniable drama in these pages, not just for the birds, the targets for German snipers’ rifles and hungry hawks alike, but also for the groups of Resistance fighters who took part in Columba and, through the diligence of Belgian collaborators and Nazi officials (among them was a lawyer who “had been instrumental in taking National Socialist ideology and expressing it in the form of laws and decrees”), sometimes paid with their lives. Among the highlights of the narrative are Winston Churchill’s personal intervention in the program and the author’s good-natured, sometimes-wry approach to the material: “If the Nazis came through your door,” he writes, “you might be able to explain away a pigeon but not a radio transmitter." Throughout, he offers reminders of how dangerous the enterprise was and how difficult the odds were: Of those 16,000 birds, only 10 percent survived.
A capable, readable look at a little-known corner of history.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-266707-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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