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WORLD WAR ONE

A solid yet concise illustrated history of the Great War by a team of international scholars. Oxford has set the standard in illustrated histories, and this one doesn—t disappoint. Though hardly revisionist, some of the essays do offer fresh insights into the conflict. David Killingray analyzes the war’s impact on Africa, already balkanized by colonization from the great European powers. Though most Africans were spared the horrors of direct participation, African economies were still torn asunder, and hundreds of thousands died from famine. Editor Strachan (Modern History/Univ. of Glasgow, Scotland) argues in a later essay that, unlike other wars, WWI was financed almost entirely through credit, not taxes (this legacy wreaked havoc on postwar Weimar Germany). Another standout piece, by Gail Braybon, posits that historians have overemphasized WWI as the catalyst for moving women into the work force. In Europe, she claims, many of the women who worked during the war had already worked before 1914. What changed was their kind of service: non-farm women who were domestics or childcare workers traded in those low-wage jobs for industrial labor. In the anthology’s final essay, Modris Eksteins provides a poignant (though overly short and superficial) exploration of the Great War and historical memory. What remained for Europe after ten million were dead and twice that number mutilated? Throughout the continent, some postwar artists and writers tried to give voice to the suffering they had seen, while others abided by an unwritten code of silence. In more recent decades, the war has been washed with a kind of romanticism, as hordes of tourists descend on the now-parklike battlefields of the Somme and Verdun. Strachan has chosen wisely, and offers a well-conceived (if brief) introduction. In all, a worthwhile contribution to WWI literature. (16 pages color, 140 b&w illustrations, 7 maps, not seen)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-19-820614-3

Page Count: 340

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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