A fine history of Italy’s attempt to punch above its weight.
Italy’s role in World War II receives an expert’s full attention.
Veteran British historian Gooch reminds readers that until 1940, figures from Churchill to Hitler looked at Mussolini as the charismatic leader of a great power. In this skillful analysis, the author reveals that there was less there than meets the eye. Like Hitler, a veteran of World War I, Mussolini was arrogant, ruthless, unnecessarily confident in his military talents, and hungry for war. What he lacked was wealth to support his ambitions. At the time, the Italian economy was one-third the size of Germany’s. Few experts praise Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia after 1935, which was extremely expensive. Italian troops did much of the fighting for Franco in Spain’s Civil War (1936-1939); Italy contributed about 75,000 soldiers, which may have turned the tide. As in Ethiopia, however, the effort was expensive. Impressed at Germany’s swift defeat of Poland in 1939 and France in 1940, Mussolini yearned for his own empire. The choices were invading Egypt from his Libyan colony or conquering Greece. Making the worst possible decision, he chose both. By 1941, his poorly organized and supplied armies were retreating, and his appeals for aid made it clear that Italy was “slipping towards a subaltern position.” Hitler’s forces crushed Greece, and he also sent a mechanized division, led by Erwin Rommel, to Africa. Rommel’s energy and superior armor produced impressive victories, but Italians made up most of his forces. With America’s entry in December 1941, Gooch enters a period more familiar to readers. “As European war turned into world war,” writes the author, “there was only one way in which Fascist Italy’s military could keep fighting—by getting ever more in hock to Nazi Germany.” There followed defeat in North Africa and Sicily and the July 1943 coup that removed Mussolini only to have German troops take over and continue a war that devastated the nation.
A fine history of Italy’s attempt to punch above its weight.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-548-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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