Highly readable and informative.
A brisk, efficient account of one of the most overlooked episodes of World War II—the Soviet invasion of Finland.
During the ominous lull between the Nazi conquest of Poland and the assault on France, the Soviet Union sought palpable assurances from neutral, democratic Finland to protect vulnerable Leningrad against attack, ostensibly from the British or the French, but in fact from Hitler, whom Stalin correctly distrusted. Finland’s refusal to “grant to a foreign state military bases on its own territory and within its own boundaries” prompted the Soviets to launch a pretextual attack: “Heroic Red Army throws back marauding Finns!” proclaimed the Daily Worker. All the world expected a swift defeat for the vastly outnumbered Finns; instead, for 105 days they fought the Russians to a bloody standstill. Though he looks at the prewar diplomatic sparring and the midwar dithering of the Anglo-French alliance, Edwards focuses mostly on the fighting. Making exquisite use of the difficult terrain and the brutal weather, the ably led Finns employed skis, automatic weapons and mortars expertly aimed to repel the Red Army, which was stymied by an astonishing lack of intelligence and a fatally flawed command structure. The war ended with painful territorial concessions by the resolute Finns, but not before exposing the fecklessness of the League of Nations and unexpected, severe weaknesses in the mighty Red Army. Hitler looked on and concluded that Operation Barbarossa, his contemplated invasion of the Soviet Union, could safely go forward. Edwards offers only tantalizing details about the war’s main actors—Baron Carl Gustav Mannerheim, the autocratic Father of the Nation; General Kurt Wallenius, the drunkard and supreme soldier; Kliment Voroshilov, the absurdly overconfident Russian commissar for defense—and others on the world stage (FDR, Churchill, Stalin) who had their say about tumultuous events in Finland. He sprinkles the narrative with numerous delightfully snarky asides about the blinkered, progressive left, which persisted in rationalizing Soviet intentions and methods, notwithstanding the spectacle of the suffering Finns.
Highly readable and informative.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-933648-50-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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