The dawn of the Cold War through a gimlet eye.
A revisionist scrutiny of a humanitarian mission.
Journalist and historian Pearson, author of My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories From the Second World War (2022), reminds readers that three years after their defeat, Germans were still hungry and their cities in ruins. Germany remained divided into four zones of occupation, as was its capital, Berlin, isolated and surrounded by the Russian-ruled eastern zone. For years, Stalin had pressured France, Britain, and the U.S. to withdraw from East Berlin, whose millions would join fellow citizens under Soviet rule. According to popular accounts, angered at the Allied refusal, he launched a blockade to starve the city into surrender, but a brilliantly organized airlift forced him to back down. This has been portrayed as a victory of freedom over tyranny, and it was—sort of. Pearson’s Stalin remains the villain, but the Western allies do not get off scot-free. Aiming to rebuild the German economy (a low priority for Stalin), U.S., Britain, and France largely ignored denazification. In 1948 they planned to introduce a strong new Reichsmark that would devastate the feeble East German currency. Pearson maintains that the blockade was no such thing. Although Stalin blocked roads, rails, and canals from West Germany, this could be better described as harassment. The black market flourished. There was no rationing in the East, from which Berliners already obtained much of their food. Finally, the massive airlift required laborers, technicians, and construction workers; Western authorities paid them with money and food. “Even though they knew Berlin would not starve, the US and British authorities leveraged the illusion of a sealed city for propaganda.”
The dawn of the Cold War through a gimlet eye.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781639368587
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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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