by Greg Behrman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2007
Berhman’s sure grasp of the geo-politics, his firm understanding of the Plan’s details and his deft portrayal of the men who...
A splendid narrative history of the Marshall Plan, perhaps the best foreign-policy idea America ever had.
Feeling entitled because of its battlefield sacrifices and driven by a seemingly ascendant Marxist ideology, Stalin’s expansionist Soviet Union saw prostrate Europe as especially vulnerable in the wake of World War II. To counter this threat, the United States conceived a comprehensive recovery program designed to revive the continent’s working economies. Wisely, the plan required European initiative and cooperation to make the aid self-sustaining, with the U.S. acting only as a constructive partner to help restore social conditions where free institutions could flourish. Fatefully, Stalin refused to allow Russia or its Eastern European satellites to participate. Berhman (The Invisible People: How the US Has Slept Through the Global AIDS Pandemic, the Greatest Humanitarian Catastrophe of Our Time, 2004) follows the plan from its infancy in the U.S. State Department, where glittering figures such as the indispensable George Marshall, George Kennan, Robert Lovett and Dean Acheson presided, through its adolescence, where Michigan’s Senator Vandenberg shepherded the European Recovery Program through Congress, to its full maturity in Europe, where W. Averell Harriman, as well as three men insufficiently remembered by history—Will Clayton, Richard Bissell and Paul Hoffman—insured its success. The Plan would have foundered had it not been for European statesmen—England’s Ernest Bevin, France’s Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman and Germany’s Conrad Adenauer—whose leadership and vision not only saved their countries, but also planted the seeds for European integration leading to NATO, the European Common Market and today’s EU. Astonishingly, billions of dollars and four years later, amidst Cold War episodes as unsettling as the Berlin airlift and the outbreak of the Korean War, the Plan had restored Western European confidence, political stability and economic health, and it secured the region as a U.S. partner for the next half century.
Berhman’s sure grasp of the geo-politics, his firm understanding of the Plan’s details and his deft portrayal of the men who made it work combine to forge a remarkable story.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8263-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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