Informed and erudite, lucid and sanguinary. (4 maps and 40 illustrations, not seen)
From the author of Occupation (1998), a splendid account of the WWI battle that raged for more than nine months and claimed more than 300,000 lives.
Relying heavily on the published and unpublished words of actual combatants, drawing on novelists and philosophers as well as historians, Ousby (who died in 2001) succeeds in mixing the perceptions of soldiers, scholars, and artists, in the process creating a unique view of a specific battle and of warfare in general. He begins by acknowledging the problems inherent in military history, which strives to produce a coherent narrative out of the chaos of combat, even though, as Ousby writes, “in the very clarity of the result lies a profound falsification.” His own opening pages assess perceptions as well as “facts” as they portray the situation at Verdun before the German artillery opened up on Feb. 21, 1916. The town was surrounded by some 19 French forts, and the nearby territory was occupied by hundreds of thousands of French and German combatants, including France’s future president, Charles de Gaulle. After his description of the initial salvos, Ousby circles back to the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and then launches into a remarkable analysis of the various (and varying) views the French and Germans had of themselves. The French, he says, were proud of their “mongrel” heritage; the Germans, by contrast, were already preaching racial purity. Germany was an industrial powerhouse, while France clung to its cultural preeminence; “the contrast between the two nations,” writes Ousby, “now looked like the contrast between modernity and obsolescence.” The author discusses the role of social theory (especially social Darwinism) in the war and examines the powerful political forces on both sides. But he does not neglect military strategy and tactics (focusing primarily on French maneuvers), nor does he fail to provide horrific accounts of the effects of large shells on frail bodies.
Informed and erudite, lucid and sanguinary. (4 maps and 40 illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-50393-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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