A stirring and well-researched remembrance of a tragic but heroic mission.
Jews in the anti-Nazi resistance.
Journalist Friedman, author of Spies of No Country: Israel’s Secret Agents at the Birth of the Mossad (2019), turns his attention to a 1944 British operation in Nazi-occupied Europe. Beginning in 1940, when Germany occupied much of Western Europe, the British encouraged anti-Nazi resistance by dropping supplies and agents by plane. Historians still debate its contribution to victory, but no one denies that it involved courage and sacrifice. Friedman’s subjects were Jewish volunteers from British-occupied Palestine. They were ideal because, having fled central Europe, they spoke German and hated Nazis. They also resented the British, who barred European Jews fleeing Nazis from entering Palestine. The author follows a group of young Jews, notably Hannah Senesh, who trained in Egypt and traveled to Italy to receive radios, codes, and money. They then boarded planes that deposited them in Central Europe to collect intelligence, guide downed Allied flyers to safety, and supported local resistance groups. The Nazis, whose spies proved incompetent, were superb at counterespionage, and resistance organizations were laced with double agents. Many volunteers landed successfully and were never heard of again. This was the fate of most of the parachutists; Senesh herself was tortured and executed. “Beyond the barest outline of the myth, it turns out that few know anything about them,” Friedman writes. But the parachutists were surprisingly literate—they wrote poetry and stories and memoirs—so Friedman was able to revive their memory thanks to the words they left behind. He also notes that their mission took place “four years before a country called Israel came into existence.” Today, Senesh “has not only a kibbutz named for her, but also a forest, and thirty-two streets.” The parachutists are national heroes.
A stirring and well-researched remembrance of a tragic but heroic mission.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118980
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
