Historians will take issue with some of the interpretations, but general readers will find this a lucid introduction to the...
Absorbing day-by-day account of the dark time when Britain seemed certain to go down in defeat to Nazi Germany.
“The period can be dated precisely,” writes English journalist Moss. It began with the blitzkrieg assault on France, Belgium, and Holland on May 10, 1940—the day, as it happens, that Winston Churchill became prime minister of Great Britain—and ended on September 15, when the Royal Air Force, aided by the Ultra code-breaking effort, drove away an armada of Luftwaffe bombers in the last major episode of the Battle of Britain, a victory that for the first time halted the seemingly unstoppable “onward march of Nazi power.” Bracketed by these two great battles, Moss’s account touches on any number of little-explored incidents, such as Hitler’s condition-laden offer of peace in July, and ventures many a revisionist take on them. For instance, he suggests that it might have been better indeed for Britain if it had made peace with Hitler in 1940: “It might have kept its empire. It would not have sacrificed lives and money in the exhausting struggle. It would not have been bankrupt.” Of course, he adds, “the world would have been worse off.” Moss adds nuance to his discussions of now-disregarded figures such as Neville Chamberlain, who labored hard to enlist Franklin Roosevelt’s aid in the fight against Nazism in a time when his fellow parliamentarians were wondering aloud whether the problem wasn’t the Nazi ideology per se but that awful fellow Hitler. He does a good job of explaining the isolationist opposition that kept Roosevelt from acting immediately, the product of heartland sentiments that didn’t see much problem with Hitler to begin with. And he revisits turning-point moments such as Churchill’s celebrated “We shall fight on the beaches” speech, which, Moss writes, “energized people in Britain in a way that seems to have been almost palpable.”
Historians will take issue with some of the interpretations, but general readers will find this a lucid introduction to the days before the tide was turned.Pub Date: May 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-10471-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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 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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