A masterly, painstakingly researched study incorporating the urgent stories of the resisters themselves.
Scrupulous, evenhanded reconsideration of the fighters of the French Resistance and how the patriotic myth became central to the identity of postwar France.
Employing a refreshing approach to the history of this traumatic epoch by sticking with firsthand testimony, both written and oral, Gildea (Modern History/Univ. of Oxford; Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914, 2008, etc.) restores some of the marginalized voices so crucial to the story: women, communists, and foreigners. Contrary to Charles de Gaulle’s official line that France was liberated by the French—that there was a “continuous thread of resistance” from the time of his initial rally from his London exile in June 1940 through liberation in August 1944 and that only a few dastardly French collaborated with the enemy—the real story is much more complicated. The majority of the French opted to “muddle through” and indeed revered and trusted the great World War I hero Philippe Pétain rather than embrace the upstart de Gaulle. Who were these early brave resisters to the German invasion? The term “patriotism” definitely meant different things to different people: the children of WWI veterans, who acted out of filial piety and family honor; those radicalized by the Spanish Civil War and who had fought against fascism in the International Brigades; political idealists who hoped to bring about a “brave new world,” such as working-class communists; immigrant refugees from fascism; and women bereft of husbands and sons, throwing themselves into activities such as sheltering downed Allied airmen, spreading propaganda, and even engaging in armed struggle. Gildea proceeds step by step in the buildup to resistance, which required both an internal and external network, especially from de Gaulle’s Allied base in London. Moreover, the liberation by the Americans of North Africa in November 1942 proved to be the “hinge” in galvanizing resistance and clarifying the Vichy versus Free French struggle.
A masterly, painstakingly researched study incorporating the urgent stories of the resisters themselves.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-674-28610-8
Page Count: 590
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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