A disturbing reevaluation of an iconic World War II battle, not definitely proven but well argued.
Unnerving findings about one of the great failed Allied operations of WWII.
On Sept. 17, 1944, Operation Market Garden landed a massive Allied force by parachute and glider behind German lines in Holland, and a British division launched an offensive from Belgium to link up. Success would entail outflanking German defenses, crossing the Rhine, and ending the war in 1944. It failed—resistance was far greater than expected. Historians fault poor terrain, bad weather, and faulty intelligence, but British journalist Verkaik, author of The Traitor of Colditz, is not the first to claim that traitors betrayed the effort. One candidate was Christiaan Lindemans, a legendary Dutch resistance fighter. Frequently arrested, resistance fighters often emerged from their interrogation as double agents, and Verkaik provides evidence supporting ongoing suspicions that Lindemans was among them. Turning to Britain, Verkaik writes that 24 hours before the operation, Nazi commanders received a warning from “a shadowy source deep in the heart of the British state, known…as Agent Josephine.” Although aware of “Josephine,” British intelligence never discovered her, possibly because a traitor led the search. That was Anthony Blunt, one of a crew of British communists who kept the USSR informed of Allied operations. With victory guaranteed, Stalin was more interested in slowing the Allies’ advance on Berlin than defeating Hitler. Market Garden’s failure (as well as December’s German Ardennes offensive) accomplished this, leaving the Red Army dominant in Eastern Europe and powerful communist parties in the west. Verkaik often overwhelms the reader with findings from archives, interviews, memoirs, letters, declassified MI5 and MI6 files, and postwar analyses that support, deny, or obfuscate the case for betrayal. He believes that Blunt was Josephine. His evidence is circumstantial, but there is plenty of it.
A disturbing reevaluation of an iconic World War II battle, not definitely proven but well argued.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781639368273
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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