The fighting spirit of Allied paratroopers comes through with exciting clarity.
Well-told accounts of Allied airborne operations Market Garden and Plunder Varsity, conceived to break across the Rhine into Germany after the Normandy invasion.
In September 1944, British Field Marshal Montgomery designed Operation Market Garden (made famous in the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far), a bold plan to use parachute troops behind enemy lines to help secure bridges across the lower Rhine. Clark (War Studies/Royal Military Academy Sandhurst; Anzio, 2006, etc.) lays out the political headaches Allied Supreme Commander Eisenhower had in running a massive, multinational war effort whose principle battlefield commanders continuously lobbied to get their attack proposals approved. Clark ably disproves the widely held notion that Market Garden was Montgomery’s wholly owned operation, which doomed thousands of soldiers’ lives for leadership glory. On the contrary, many Allied field commanders had confidence in Market Garden as “a calculated risk which would be interesting and revealing, whatever happened.” But the plan was fraught with logistical problems from the beginning, and the Allies underestimated German tenacity. Six months later, in March 1945, Operation Plunder Varsity proved they had learned from mistakes made with Market Garden’s airborne assault. Better timing, clear supply lines and airborne troops kept in tight units made this push across the Rhine decisive. Nazi generals knew the end was near. “When the briefing had finished, the Field Marshal [Kesselring] asked, ‘Is there any good news at all?’ ” recalls his Oberstleutnant. “The Staff officers looked at each other and shrugged. There was silence.” Clark is best when narrating battle scenes at a rapid pace. Personal narratives gleaned from soldiers on both sides of the battle lines bring home small-scale episodes of grunt fighting, heroism and pitiful death: “Slamming down the hill, firing from the hip and screaming at the top of our lungs,” remembers the sergeant of a platoon that attacked several hundred German troops, “we acted like crazy Indians on the warpath.”
The fighting spirit of Allied paratroopers comes through with exciting clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-87113-989-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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