A straightforward account considers all sides to these precise missions.
From breaching German dams to targeting U-boat pens with “Grand Slams,” the Royal Air Force’s 617 Squadron receives fresh recognition for crippling the Nazi war machine.
Not everyone was eager to sing the praises of the Dambusters, a highly effective and deadly squadron, after their initial destruction of the Möhne and Eder dams on May 16, 1943. In this history of the squadron, complete with personal accounts of the pilots involved, journalist and former Royal Air Force pilot Nichol (co-author: The Last Escape: The Untold Story of Allied Prisoners of War in Europe 1944-45, 2003, etc.) looks frankly at the terrible cost in terms of lives lost over the course of the squadron’s deadly, strategic missions, as well as those of the enemy, especially among civilians, weighed against the exigencies of a terrible total war. British engineer Barnes Wallis had created the “bouncing bomb” that would be so effective against the German dams, dropped surgically by a well-trained, all-volunteer crew of the RAF Bomber Command, 617 Squadron, piloting powerful Lancasters under the initial fierce leadership of Wing Commander Guy Penrose Gibson. Following a disastrous attack on the Dortmund-Ems Canal in September, low-level flying was out, with new bombs and more accurate bombsights employed, leading to runs on German-reinforced underground sites at Pas-de-Calais, France, where Hitler’s new “V-weapons” were being assembled by an army of slave laborers. These “Death or Glory” commands—e.g., the bombing of the Michelin rubber factory in March 1944 and the German army camp at Mailly-le-Camp—were successful lead-ups to the Allied D-Day invasion. Subsequent "Tallboy” (Wallis’ new bombs that could penetrate 15 feet of reinforced concrete) raids wreaked havoc on German construction and naval sites. There was no feeling rueful about the destruction until after the war, as many of the personal stories reveal here.
A straightforward account considers all sides to these precise missions.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1274-4
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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