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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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