Plenty of excitement and good writing, along with the occasional clunker.
Three dozen accounts, many excerpted from previously published work, of military and paramilitary exploits that will provide long hours of pleasure to buffs.
The titular “mammoth” is accurate, as usual, but “elite forces” is an exaggeration. Many of these dramatic actions involved either regular units—like the U-boat that snuck into Scapa Flow in 1940 to sink a British battleship and the US Marines on Peleiu in 1944, or volunteers from ordinary units, such as Doolittle’s 1941 raid on Tokyo, Merrill’s Marauders fighting till they collapsed in Burma in 1944—and the Flying Tigers in early 1940s China. If paratroopers and engineers are included, most of the accounts involve units with specialized training such as Green Berets, Rangers, Navy SEALs, and British Commandos. In any case, the end results were often spectacular, including some dazzling triumphs and a surprising number of disasters. Lewis (The Mammoth Book of True War Stories, not reviewed) sticks to the years since 1939; all the stories provide fireworks, but the prose quality varies. A witty account of a failed 1942 British raid behind Rommel’s lines mostly describes a long, long walk across the desert to safety. A few chapters, like the one recounting a battle during the Falklands War, are written in turgid militarese. Plenty of incidents are also old-hat: the Israeli hostage rescue at Entebbe, the Ranger assault on the cliff at Omaha Beach, the Nazi rescue of Mussolini, disasters at Arnhem and Dieppe. Yet jaws will drop at the tale of one of the greatest sabotage operation in any war, carried out by Italy, a nation not known for its warriors. Three midget subs crept into Alexandria harbor in 1941 and blew up three British ships, including two battleships.
Plenty of excitement and good writing, along with the occasional clunker.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0952-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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