Useful for the military scholar and captivating to the general reader, Cowley’s collection is likely to stand among the best...
Cowley (What If?, 1999) was the founding editor of Military History Quarterly. Under his guidance, the journal published not only traditional historical essays from prominent writers (such as Stephen Ambrose and John Keegan), it also collected and printed firsthand accounts of 20th-century battles. Cowley has here collected 44 of these essays, and he organizes them chronologically, opening with a section on the German breakout into Poland and France and closing with works on the brutal end of the war in the Pacific. In addition to the expected contributions from Ambrose, Keegan, and William Manchester, there are intriguing glimpses into the war’s less well-known operations: Dan Kurzman, for instance, brings to life the plan to sabotage Hitler’s A-bomb program by raiding Norway’s heavy-water plant, and George Feifer follows Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’s bizarre race to complete one final motion picture for the Reich before its disintegration. Eyewitness memoirs (such as William Whyte’s account of patrolling Guadalcanal as a junior Marine officer) lend a participatory air of authority to the proceedings. Although there is nothing new here in terms of historical research, these essays will revive the drama and sense of desperation that marked WWII for a new generation of readers.
Useful for the military scholar and captivating to the general reader, Cowley’s collection is likely to stand among the best histories of the year.Pub Date: March 19, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14711-X
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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