In a limpidly written tribute to the friendship that epitomized the ``special relationship'' between Britain and the US, Alldritt (English/Univ. of British Columbia; Churchill the Writer, 1993, not reviewed, etc.) celebrates FDR and Winston Churchill's fateful association. In retrospect, the affinity between the British and American leaders of WW II seems natural: They shared similarly aristocratic backgrounds, professional interest in naval affairs, a commitment to representative democracy, an internationalist outlook, and, ultimately, a conviction that fascism needed to be stopped by force. But the first encounter between FDR and Churchill was not propitious: In a 1918 speech to a visiting delegation of Americans that included then Undersecretary of the Navy Roosevelt, Churchill offended his guests by implying that America needed British know- how and direction. However, first as a member of Prime Minister Chamberlain's wartime government and later as prime minister himself, it was Churchill who reached out for American aid and support in response to Roosevelt's invitation to ``keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about.'' As Alldritt shows, the relationship between the American president and the British statesman—commenced, probably improperly, while Churchill was a member of the Cabinet—quickly became warm and comradely. Although he documents some of the jealousies and tensions between the two men, as well as their sometimes profound differences in style and outlook, Alldritt appears to gloss over the more strained moments; for instance, he depicts the destroyers-for-bases deal, which some historians have characterized as the product of harsh American bargaining, as an exemplar of Rooseveltian cooperation. But Alldritt is surely correct in concluding that, in the end, this close and affectionate friendship, manifested in nine wartime meetings and 1,700 messages, ``became a force in and upon history.'' Not a landmark contribution to historical scholarship, but a pleasant reflection on the possibilities of friendship.
Pub Date: Nov. 20, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13505-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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