Of modest interest to students of military history. Jeremy Black’s Great Military Leaders and Their Campaigns, among other...
Conventional study of a dozen unconventional military leaders.
What makes a maverick politician? Apparently, recent history suggests, going against party leadership once or twice. What makes a maverick military leader? By former Economist assistant editor and parliamentarian Harvey’s account, there are 16 desiderata, ranging from “outstanding and exemplary courage under fire” to “high intelligence, often concealed under a veneer of military bluffness, and communications skills,” along with episodes of insubordination, a fondness for fighting against the odds and an improvisational character. OK: So Norman Schwarzkopf and George Meade are out. But where’s George Custer? Alexander of Macedon? Georgy Zhukov? Vercingetorix? Vinegar Joe Stilwell? Most are absent because Harvey’s bandwidth is narrow, confined to the period from 1757 to World War II and embracing Anglo-American and Northern European (Garibaldi excepted), predictable figures such as the Duke of Wellington, Erwin Rommel and George S. Patton. Ever since Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1970 film Patton, there’s not much point in discussing the last two, who were famed for defying orders and doing whatever the hell they wanted to. George Washington wasn’t exactly defiant when he attacked the Hessians at Trenton, though, admittedly, when in the thick of battle Admiral Nelson had a tendency to forget he had heard from the bosses. Clive of India did his thing without undue flash, even if he did suffer from moments of depression “and, rarely, displays of cruelty.” James Wolfe was exceedingly brave on the Plains of Abraham—but was not Montcalm as well? Harvey’s book suffers foremost from his obvious choices—only the British sea captain Thomas Cochrane is not widely known, save to students of the Napoleonic Wars. The narrative has the feel of being shoehorned to fit its guiding model, one that is conceptually thin to begin with.
Of modest interest to students of military history. Jeremy Black’s Great Military Leaders and Their Campaigns, among other recent surveys, is more satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60239-356-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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 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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