It’s a dismal piece of history, well told and familiar, but Clark provides plenty of juicy details and a mildly...
A leading British historian delivers a new history of Germany’s 1940 invasion of France.
Hitler’s invasion was a daring operation in which troops pierced the seemingly impassible Ardennes Forest and shattered the Allied army. This is the traditional account, and, according to Clark (Modern War Studies and Contemporary Military History/Univ. of Buckingham; The Battle of the Tanks: Kursk, 1943, 2011, etc.), that’s pretty much what happened. Without a doubt, it was spectacular, and the author writes a masterly account teeming with vivid personalities and the usual mixture of heroism, incompetence, and luck. Clark emphasizes that Germany’s high command was as unimaginative as France’s. When Hitler’s generals proposed invading through Belgium, he objected, stressing that it hadn’t worked in 1914. Furthermore, France expected it. It took more rejections before a few adventurous generals produced the plan that caught his fancy. However, it was not a given that it would succeed. On May 10, 1940, an army attacked the Low Countries, preoccupying the main Allied force. When German troops emerged from the Ardennes three days later, they faced the Meuse River, a substantial barrier. Had the Allies rushed reinforcements at that moment, the outcome might have been different. As it was, Wehrmacht forces poured across and raced to the Channel, cutting off the main Allied army. The remainder retreated for a month until Marshal Pétain took office and, overcoming modest opposition, requested an armistice. Clark maintains that this was not a blitzkrieg—i.e., a massive attack spearheaded by tanks—but an extremely risky traditional operation, carried out energetically and significantly aided by chance, weather, and an inflexible enemy.
It’s a dismal piece of history, well told and familiar, but Clark provides plenty of juicy details and a mildly controversial reinterpretation.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2513-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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