A fruitful, timely work in an era of ever-increasing military spending.
Provocative examination of modern history, showing that World War II was all but inevitable given the military-industrial-political complex of the day.
In Europe and Asia in the era following World War I, writes Maiolo (International History and War Studies/King’s College, London; The Royal Navy and Nazi Germany, 1933–1939, 1998), many of the world’s powers decided to shake off the bad memories of the trenches and rearm. As the author notes, the United States hardly figured at the beginning, its standing army tiny and military budget almost nonexistent. France had the biggest army in the world in 1929, and the other powers measured themselves against it. Some rearmed deliberately, taking the first steps to do so under the tutelage of the likes of Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky and Werner von Blomberg. This armament and rearmament came packed with apocalyptic visions. Joseph Stalin, for instance, believed that “the ruling classes in Paris and London would soon face the choice of either class war on their own streets or joining forces to strike a spiteful blow against that beacon of proletarian hope, the Soviet Union.” That blow would come from Germany, of course, which had an apocalyptic vision to match Stalin’s—as did Japan, whose military leaders predicted an Armageddon in which “the Japanese were destined to lead Asia against the United States.” Ironies abound in Maiolo’s account. For one, the plan to build up the United States as a military-industrial power was drafted by an army officer named Dwight Eisenhower, who later warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. For another, Germany never fully rearmed until well into WWII, in part because Hitler “never dedicated himself to hands-on administration,” and his lieutenants spent too much time squabbling about who got which resources. In the end, writes the author, most of the nations that indulged in the arms race of the era wound up in smoke and ruins or nearly bankrupt.
A fruitful, timely work in an era of ever-increasing military spending.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-465-01114-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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