This precise, highly detailed academic look at the strategic decisions made by Hitler and his General Staff throughout the latter part of WWII offers little to anyone but the most specialized of military scientists. While flirting with the burgeoning nonfiction trend of “what-if” speculation, Austrian military historian Magenheimer offers substantial background when evaluating both the decisions made and the alternatives rejected at WWII’s key turning points (though the author avoids this phrase as reductive). Among the areas scrutinized: the Battle of Britain, Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, the ever-puzzling declaration of war on the US—puzzling to historians, as a close reading of their alliance shows no Nazi obligation to declare war when Japan did—the disastrous siege of Stalingrad, and the general Axis downturn in 1943, followed by D-Day and eventual defeat. Magenheimer organizes his narrative chronologically, beginning with Germany’s blitzkrieg assaults, moving through the early campaigns to the point at which Germany lost strategic initiative and began to lose hold of “Fortress Europe,” then eventually considering its defeat. While Magenheimer intelligently dissects German decisions and actions, he makes little attempt to place these actions in the broader context of the Nazis” other strategic although nonmilitary goal, genocide. The author’s dense arguments concerning why various campaigns developed as they did will take far more than the sparse maps provided in the book to make any sense to the less-than-omnisciently informed. Such readers will do far better to refer to any of the excellent strategic overviews of the war now in print. An altogether dry and impenetrable, albeit well researched and carefully argued, attempt to make sense of the manner in which the Nazis waged war.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-85409-472-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
