A revisionist look that won’t cheer America-firsters but that helps broaden our understanding of a crucial battle.
The Normandy invasion was a critical victory for the Allies. According to military historian Kershaw (24 Hours at the Somme: 1 July 1916, 2017, etc.), it could have been a crushing defeat.
If the other Normandy beaches that Allied troops stormed on June 6, 1944, had been as bloody as Omaha Beach, argues the author, a veteran of later wars, then Dwight Eisenhower might have had to send out the memo of defeat that he instead pocketed, the one that famously said, “if any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.” As it was, the Allies squeaked by. Studying the operation from a military point of view, without the stagy but effective set pieces of Cornelius Ryan and the political interests of Anthony Beevor, Kershaw describes an awful day of battle. Commendably, his account includes plenty of testimonials from the German side, which had all the advantages of the well-entrenched defender but a few odd weaknesses as well. For instance, unbeknownst to Allied intelligence, a heavily battle-tested German infantry division, with plenty of survivors of Stalingrad and other flashpoints, was well dug in near Omaha, which explains all the carnage Steven Spielberg so vividly depicted in Saving Private Ryan. At the same time, some of the German defenses, such as an anti-tank barrier, were just this side of Potemkin villages. The Germans knew invasion was coming; they just didn’t know quite where. But they were ready, with one grizzled commander ordering, “if possible, do not take prisoners under ten men.” That the American landing force survived Omaha at all—as it is, the day posted one of the greatest casualty counts of any battle Americans fought in—seems little short of a miracle and is evidence of how badly good intelligence is needed in any fight. That said, Kershaw singles out for praise numerous fighting elements, such as the U.S. Army Rangers, who helped break the German lines.
A revisionist look that won’t cheer America-firsters but that helps broaden our understanding of a crucial battle.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-866-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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