A fresh and persuasive outlook on one of the great moral crossroads in world history.
Historical account of the policies and strategies underlying the air war over Japan.
Overy, a British historian of World War II, does good service straightaway by showing that Britain, though “often overlooked in accounts of Japanese defeat,” was active in it: Winston Churchill approved the use of the atomic bomb, and, freed after Germany’s surrender, British bomber squadrons were on their way to join the Americans in the last months of the war in the Pacific. That war was long foreseen: For decades before Pearl Harbor, American and British war planners had gamed out numerous scenarios about fighting Japan, including the use of warplanes well before such warplanes even existed: “The doctrinal shape of the future bombing campaign against Japan was already developed long before there was any capability of achieving it.” It wasn’t until 1943, writes Overy, that the possibility began to emerge of land-based air facilities capable of putting planes in the sky over Japan. Once that became a reality with the capture of Saipan and other islands in 1944, America was ready to engage in a campaign of terror bombing that specifically targeted civilian populations—to which Overy attaches racist views of the Japanese as less than human. (Quoth Life magazine in May 1945: “hating Japs comes natural—as natural as fighting Indians once was”). By Overy’s view, the atomic bombings were an extension of the firebombing of Japan’s cities—and even those two bombs were not the foremost causes for Japan to finally capitulate. Interestingly, Overy notes in closing that the German and Japanese bombings of civilians earlier in the war were not raised in war crimes trials “because British and American air forces had done exactly that, and deliberately, in the last years of war, abandoning the restrictions on targeting civilians in force when the war began.”
A fresh and persuasive outlook on one of the great moral crossroads in world history.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781324105305
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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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