The horror of war brought pungently to life, with tragedies strewn everywhere, touching everybody.
A horrific piece of British national amnesia bobs to the surface in Fenby's absorbing account of the ill-fated Lancastria.
Although the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in the early summer of 1940 had been a remarkable achievement, it was far from the total success that Winston Churchill claimed. Of the half-million members of the force, 150,000 remained in France. Perhaps as many as 6,000 of those unlucky souls, along with a number of women and children, boarded the Lancastria, a converted Cunard liner, in the days before June 17, when a German dive-bomber dropped four bombs on the ship. Within 20 horrible minutes, described in detail through a rich collection of firsthand narratives, the vessel turned turtle and sank. At least 3,500 died, maybe 4,000. Churchill ordered an immediate gag on the catastrophe. So much was going wrong at the time—France was suing for peace, invasion forces were massing on the other side of the Channel, the Luftwaffe was clearly getting ready to bomb British cities—that he feared for the British spirit. Then, “in the rush of events, as he put it, he forgot to lift the ban.” And so the greatest maritime disaster of the 1900s went missing. Fenby (Chiang Kai-Shek, 2004, etc.), however, has done a thorough job of interviewing the survivors (who still hold an annual memorial service), gaining pictures of what it was like simply getting to St-Nazaire, where the ship was anchored; the atmosphere aboard; and then what it was like to be in the drink, amid burning oil, with planes sweeping in to machine-gun the survivors. The writer provides startling imagery—because of the all the men clinging to the hull, the turned-over Lancastria resembles a whale in khaki—and good stories, like the one of French girls dispensing wine-bottle corks to plug strafing holes in rowboats.
The horror of war brought pungently to life, with tragedies strewn everywhere, touching everybody.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1532-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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