Despite an overabundance of not-always-relevant detail, Hindley’s account of WWII–era Casablanca is expertly researched and...
An impressive work of scholarship examines the role of the Moroccan port of Casablanca during World War II.
For most Americans, Casablanca conjures images of Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, drama, war, heroics, and high romance. Students of WWII history, however, know that Casablanca refers not only to the Hollywood classic, but to the real Moroccan city that served a major role during the war. In her first book, Hindley, a historian and senior writer for the quarterly journal Humanities whose articles have also appeared in the New York Times and Salon, delivers what could become the definitive account of Casablanca during WWII. The author focuses mostly on the role of the city in Allied military strategy: Winston Churchill, especially, favored a strategy whereby North Africa would serve as “a base for attacking the Germans through the Mediterranean.” Meanwhile, President Franklin Roosevelt’s staff favored a cross-channel approach. “For them,” writes the author, “North Africa was a potentially expensive and bloody diversion from the real goal of reclaiming France and then Germany.” Hindley describes these military machinations in great detail, but she also humanizes the scholarship with stories of some of the refugees, resistance fighters, spies, and regular citizens who passed through Casablanca during the war. Regarding the last, the city “became an important destination for those attempting to escape the grip of the Nazis and make their way to Lisbon. A ticket to Casablanca might end with glory or death.” While it is those personal stories that make the book accessible to general readers, the wealth of detail can become overwhelming; a seemingly endless parade of diplomats, spies, and political figures move through the narrative. Fewer details would have streamlined it, but the book should prove indispensable to scholars.
Despite an overabundance of not-always-relevant detail, Hindley’s account of WWII–era Casablanca is expertly researched and absorbing.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61039-405-5
Page Count: 510
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2017
HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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