Nothing new here, but the author knows his subject, and his lucid prose is a pleasure to read.
A traditional history of WWI, viewed typically as a major tragedy of the 20th century.
Although the US didn’t enter the war until 1917, Zieger (History/Univ. of Florida) reminds readers that American neutrality was never impartial. Businessmen and the educated elite tended to be Anglophiles, stirred up by floods of English propaganda accusing the Germans of outrageous acts, many fictional. The Germans helped by committing genuine outrages (burning the Louvain library, sinking the Lusitania, executing Edith Cavell), as well as by blunders reminiscent of the Keystone Cops (clumsy attempts at sabotage, the harebrained Zimmerman telegram). When the U-boat campaign finally goaded the US into war, initial response was less than spectacular. In contrast to the avalanche of American production that swamped the Nazis and Japanese, the Yanks fought in 1917–18 with artillery, transport, planes, and helmets supplied by their allies. American finance contributed more to victory than American troops. The war’s depressing aftermath has been chronicled many times, but Zieger retells the story well. The Versailles Treaty was vindictive, he acknowledges, but no more so than other treaties forced on prostrate enemies. He also asserts that President Wilson’s naïveté has been exaggerated. Wilson knew the Allies’ vengeful demands made nonsense of his idealistic Fourteen Points but believed their acquiescence to a League of Nations justified all compromises. (Ironically, the US Senate failed to approve the League.) The war provided great benefits to American labor, women, and blacks, Zieger points out. Peace cancelled most benefits, but the good times planted seeds that bore fruit later: blacks began their migration to northern cities; women got the vote; labor savored its first experience of a friendly government.
Nothing new here, but the author knows his subject, and his lucid prose is a pleasure to read.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8476-9644-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
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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