An eloquent dive into World War I cemeteries, monuments, mines, and trenches.
A journey back to the French rural landscape where so many American soldiers fell during World War I.
Maine-based journalist and author Rubin (The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War, 2013, etc.) offers a fine on-the-ground account of some of the iconic battles of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, during which the Americans helped turn the tide finally against the Germans in late 1918. Readers following in Rubin’s scramble across the largely unmarked rural terrain will need a solid background to the actual fighting since, in many places, the author (who does not speak French) felt like he was the only “Anglophone tourist” who had been there since 1918. Artifact hunting is a serious avocation in these parts, and Rubin admits that one should be mentored in the pursuit, as he was for his previous research by Jean-Paul de Vries, the proprietor of a relics museum in Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. The author examines the sites of the most terrible battles missed by the Americans during the first months of the war: Verdun, the Somme, Ypres. The young doughboys of the American Expeditionary Forces were eager to join the fighting, which occurred in Bathelémont, where the first Americans fell in November 1917. Rubin explored the eerie chalk mines on the so-called Chemins des Dames, where the Yankee Division took shelter in early 1918 and where the walls are scrawled with American graffiti, in effect “their last will and testament.” From there, Rubin visited Château-Thierry on the Marne, where Gen. John Pershing’s Americans engaged the German Spring Offensive of 1918, including the legendary Battle of Belleau. Indeed, it was the Americans—and only the Americans—who could drive the Germans back, retaking the occupied territory held for four years. Throughout the book, Rubin sounds his theme of the Americans being crucial to France’s ultimate freedom (as amply recognized by the grateful French).
An eloquent dive into World War I cemeteries, monuments, mines, and trenches.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08432-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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