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EISENHOWER'S ARMIES

THE AMERICAN-BRITISH ALLIANCE DURING WORLD WAR II

A detailed, entertaining history of a successful, if bumpy, military alliance.

Anglo-American cooperation during World War II worked, more or less.

Barr (Defence Studies/King’s Coll., London; Pendulum of War: Three Battles at El Alamein, 2005, etc.) quotes but does not entirely agree with United States Army Chief of Staff George Marshall that it was “the most complete unification of military effort ever achieved by two Allied nations.” After reviewing the many painful lessons of the war, the author delivers an astute, always engrossing account of how civilian leaders (Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt) and their army chiefs (Marshall, Alan Brooke) recruited, trained, and deployed two immense armies. This process, as the author notes, “developed over time from rather inauspicious beginnings.” After Pearl Harbor, a Washington-based Combined Chiefs of Staff—Marshall, Adm. Ernest King, and Britain’s virtually unknown but crucial Field Marshal Sir John Dill—hashed out strategy, and supreme commander Dwight Eisenhower worked to keep his generals’ attention on the enemy when they often preferred to fight each other. Many conflicts had less to do with nationality than personality; Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was probably more unpopular with British than American colleagues. Barr does well on the big picture. The majority proposed a Germany-first strategy, but neither the British king nor the American public went along, so the U.S. gave equal attention to Japan. British leaders disliked America’s intention to attack Germany directly and successfully argued for campaigns in North Africa and Italy, which, in retrospect, put only modest pressure on Hitler. Barr does even better when he narrows his focus. Anecdotes, journals, and letters make it clear that prejudices are stubborn and problems remained (Americans hated the British rationing system), but most officers and men worked harder than their superiors to get the job done.

A detailed, entertaining history of a successful, if bumpy, military alliance.

Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-60598-816-0

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Pegasus

Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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