by Patrick Bishop ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 2003
Nicely written and rich in detail: a winner for students of aerial warfare.
A spirited account of what Winston Churchill deemed the Royal Air Force’s “finest hour”: the defense of English skies against the advancing Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940.
Since Churchill’s day, the Battle of Britain has been among the most heavily studied episodes of WWII—and rightly so, the four-month-long dogfight having been one of the early turning points of that great conflict, setting the stage for future Allied victories. Daily Telegraph associate editor Bishop adds to the literature twofold. By focusing on the young men who, smitten by visions of heroism and fed in childhood on tales of WWI aces real (Albert Ball) and fictional (James Bigglesworth), made up the fighter wings of the RAF in the opening days of the war against Hitler, he first delivers a class-conscious, highly personalized view of the battle. “You did not need ties of blood or romance to feel a particular bond with the Fighter Boys,” he writes of his contemporary compatriots. “The backgrounds of the 3,000 or so pilots flying Hurricanes and Spitfires in the summer of 1940 reflected the social composition of the nation.” Which is to say, unlike the British army, the RAF was made up of men who, in the main, had come from the working class or risen from the ranks, whose notions of patriotism and duty were a shade different from those of the upper crust. (For all that, one of Bishop’s heroes is Denis Wissler, an heir to the fortune wrought by Marmite, the strange vegetable spread beloved of the English.) Second, Bishop draws liberally on the memories of the Luftwaffe pilots who flew against England, many of whom believed, in the words of one, that “it would be possible to beat the English in England the way we had beaten them in France.” As, of course, they did not: and whereas the Battle of Britain didn’t, strictly speaking, bleed the Luftwaffe dry, Bishop does a good job of considering the implications of the German failure in light of subsequent developments throughout the European theater of operations.
Nicely written and rich in detail: a winner for students of aerial warfare.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03230-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
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 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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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