An evenhanded, efficient account of one of World War II’s signature moments.
From the Allied landings at Normandy to Charles de Gaulle’s triumphant march down the Champs-Élysées, a war historian tracks the ouster of the Nazis from the City of Light.
After four years of a humiliating occupation, Paris prepared during the summer of 1944 to finally throw off the Nazi shackles. Hitler ordered the city defended to the last man, reduced to rubble if necessary. With the Allied armies only 150 miles away, factions among the Resistance forces, many of them communist, jostled for leadership. They all shared a hatred for the Vichy regime, sought vengeance against collaborationists and wanted Parisians to liberate themselves. None knew that Allied commanders, dismissing the city’s strategic value, aimed instead to capture key ports and drive the German army east. De Gaulle appreciated the city’s symbolic importance. He knew that capturing Paris was the key to postwar power in France, and he wanted the capital liberated by his army. Neiberg’s (History/Univ. of Southern Mississippi/U.S. Army War College; Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I, 2011, etc.) taut narrative explains how the liberation played out. While he makes clear that credit for the city’s emancipation must be shared, he features the contribution of the Resistance, especially the tireless Henri Rol-Tanguy, the martyred Jean Moulin and Robert Monod and Roger Cocteau. Neiberg highlights the critical role played by the Paris police force and the heroism of thousands of anonymous Parisians. Hurling Molotov cocktails and harassing German soldiers from behind makeshift barricades, they suffered 500 men killed and 2,000 wounded. Neiberg also effectively debunks commanding German Gen. Choltitz’s postwar claim that he surrendered Paris for humanitarian reasons by demonstrating the hopelessness of his military situation and noting he was “motivated in no small part by his deep fear of the Paris mob.”
An evenhanded, efficient account of one of World War II’s signature moments.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-465-02399-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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