First-rate reading for fans of cloak-and-dagger stuff, and for students of WWII history.
A lively recounting of America’s shadow war against the Axis powers, fraught with peril, treachery, and bad decisions.
William J. Donovan, a distinguished hero of the Great War, fought an uphill battle to establish a military intelligence unit that worked across service and agency boundaries, but he was vindicated by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the aftermath, “Wild Bill’s” fledgling unit was put under the authority of the Joint Chiefs, though given considerable leeway; Donovan used his relative freedom to emphasize an “integrated ‘combined arms’ of shadow war techniques” and to otherwise sharpen the Office of Strategic Service’s skills in the fine arts of “persuasion, penetration and intimidation.” Among OSS’s specialties was a refined understanding of military logistics: its “bespectacled economists, historians, political scientists, and historians” were able to glean considerable intelligence from raw reports and economic data, making the first accurate estimates of such things as German tank production and orders of battle. But, as O’Donnell (Beyond Valor, 2001) writes, drawing on vivid oral histories by unit veterans, OSS types were not all bookworms; hundreds performed heroic and unlikely deeds behind enemy lines, organizing partisan resistance, committing acts of sabotage, and gathering critically important intelligence. One not untypical operative, writes O’Donnell, was a Russian prince who “emigrated to the United States, married an Astor, and became vice president of Hilton International”—and who helped organize the Allied invasion of Sardinia. OSS had its failings, O’Donnell acknowledges, especially in the Pacific Theater and in the Balkans, where operatives missed opportunities to land in Istria and arrive in Vienna before the Soviets—which would have changed the postwar era considerably. Even so, O’Donnell believes, the OSS did well to gather intelligence about the Soviets as well as the Axis, and in the end, he observes, OSS “may have made its greatest contribution, not to winning World War Two, but to winning the Cold War.”
First-rate reading for fans of cloak-and-dagger stuff, and for students of WWII history.Pub Date: March 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3572-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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