A taut real-life thriller.
The story of two teams of OSS commandos dropped behind enemy lines to cut off Nazi transportation routes through the rugged Italian Alps.
Military historian O’Donnell (We Were One, 2006, etc.) once again presents multiple perspectives from various sides of the battle lines, making use of diaries, letters, radio transmissions and reports, as well as hundreds of hours of interviews he conducted with participants. Among the significant actors were a pair of murderous Gestapo officers, a charismatic Italian partisan, a mysterious Swiss-born countess working as a French spy and a colorful OSS recruit whose résumé included stints as a cook, a maitre d’, a soldier for Franco and a deserter from the French Foreign Legion. Most significant of all were newly minted OSS agents Capt. Stephen Hall and Capt. Howard Chappell, young, tough soldiers who had nothing to prove to anyone but themselves. In 1943, Hall wrote a letter to the OSS outlining a plan to parachute into the Italian Alps with enough supplies and explosives to be a one-man wrecking crew. His target: the high-mountain Brenner Pass rails and roads linking Austria with Italy, the Nazi war machine’s lifeblood for supplies. Sent with a small team to make contact with Italian partisan fighters, Hall began his commando operations under the noses of German troops scouring the land in search of saboteurs. Chappell’s team set out to link with Hall’s, even as Hall began a solo move on Brenner Pass after the Nazis tightened their noose around the partisans. The endgame to this cat-and-mouse hinged on who got to whom first. O’Donnell clearly enjoys narrating war’s gristle along with its meat; small successes and failures ground the story in the reality of sabotage, reconnaissance, capture and escape, torture and murder. Along the way, the participants’ motivations, allegiances, thoughts and actions come alive in vigorous, exciting prose.
A taut real-life thriller.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-306-81577-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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
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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