Conroy adds personality and background to the official account of the crucial Casablanca Conference.
Despite a clash of egos and deep-seated differences, a crucial conclave mapped out a war-winning path.
Planning military strategy is an enormously difficult task; when several nations are involved, it becomes even more problematic. Conroy, the author of Lincoln’s White House, chronicles the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, when Churchill, Roosevelt, and their senior generals met to plan the next phase of World War II. The conflict was beginning to turn in favor of the Allies but was a long way from over, and there were serious divisions about how to proceed. A faction of the American delegation wanted to focus their attention on fighting the Japanese, while the British saw the Nazis as the principal enemy. There were also questions about when and how to launch an invasion of Europe and the likely postwar landscape. The French leaders, apparently more concerned with scoring political points than winning the war, were a constant irritant. Disagreements became heated and personal, but the delegation eventually hammered out a feasible plan. It involved the capture of Sicily to secure Mediterranean supply routes, an increase in the bombing campaign aimed at Germany, and a deferral of the invasion of Western Europe until more forces were gathered. While the British achieved most of what they wanted, it became clear that the U.S., as the critical source of manpower, materiel, and money, would henceforth be the dominant player of the Allies. The official minutes of the conference were published in 1973, but Conroy is a diligent researcher and finds some new material in participants’ diaries and correspondence, providing extra depth and color. Even though this is the first book-length analysis of the conference, the substance of the proceedings is already well known. For this reason, it will appeal mainly to aficionados of WWII history.
Conroy adds personality and background to the official account of the crucial Casablanca Conference.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781982168681
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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 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
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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