by Jon Latimer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2001
An intriguing and lively summary that will appeal mainly to readers with a very general interest in military issues and...
Former British army officer and military historian Latimer (Operation Compass 1940, not reviewed) provides an introduction to contemporary doctrines involving military deception, enlivened and exemplified by anecdotes ranging from the ancient Egyptians to the recent air war against Serbia.
The first half of Latimer’s study makes one main point: deception is most successfully employed when commanders use it to prompt specific enemy responses. That central tenet serves as the springboard into discussion of operational and strategic uses of military deception. Numerous dramatically described examples, such as the daring British evacuation at Gallipoli or the Allied conversion of Nazi spies into double agents, effectively illustrate his analysis of the importance of military subterfuge. Latimer offers similar elucidation of these principles in sea and air operations with equally entertaining results. He devotes the remainder of these pages to long case studies showing how both Operation Bodyguard (the Allied deception plan supporting the D-day invasion) and Soviet trickery on the WWII Eastern front forced the German military into weakened positions in reaction to Allied deception. Ultimately, Latimer concludes that deception plays as important a role in modern war as it has throughout history. This is not a particularly earth-shattering revelation, but the author does offer a clear assessment of deception’s battlefield utility and places it in an entertaining, if well-trod, historical context.
An intriguing and lively summary that will appeal mainly to readers with a very general interest in military issues and history. (35 b&w photographs, 10 maps)Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-204-1
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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