A gripping chronicle of warfare in extreme conditions.
Fighting in freezing-cold waters.
Beginning soon after Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of the USSR, Britain and, after Pearl Harbor, the United States sent supplies in 78 convoys sailing across the Arctic north of Norway to Soviet ports. Journalist and historian Sebag-Montefiore, author of Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man, covers a subject well explored by scholars such as Richard Woodman in Arctic Convoys: 1941-45, but he is a tireless researcher who has turned up letters, diaries, and personal accounts that fill in some gaps. Soviet ports remained ice-free, so convoys sailed year-round, but even arctic summers were freezing, foggy, and stormy, with icebergs a persistent threat. Not surprisingly, everyone hated the weather. As Sebag-Montefiore writes of the sailors, “when they signed up to the Merchant Navy, they had to be able to endure a claustrophobic existence below decks, the monotony of an uneventful long journey, as well as terror when the wind got up and the sea became rough.” Relentlessly ungrateful, Stalin and his agents denounced the allies for skimping on supplies and fleeing German attacks; their hostility extended to allied seamen, both healthy and injured, landing at their ports, where hospitals were so primitive that amputations were performed without anesthesia. A lively writer, Sebag-Montefiore delivers 600 pages that will hold most readers’ attention without attempting to cover all the battles, courage, suffering, and tortuous strategic and political background. The author takes advantage of interviews and fresh documentation to emphasize the experiences of individual sailors. Heroism was not in short supply, but readers may squirm at the scale of their suffering. Sailors who jumped into the icy water when abandoning ship froze to death within minutes. Remaining dry in a lifeboat was impossible, and frostbite was epidemic. Terrible weather and the priority of fending off attackers meant that rescue was slow or absent.
A gripping chronicle of warfare in extreme conditions.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781639369010
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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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