A somber narrative of the third battle of Ypres, the failed British drive in 1917 to capture strategic Belgian channel ports held by the Germans in WW I. Australian coauthors of Command in the Western Front (1992), Prior (History/Univ. of New South Wales) and Wilson (History/Univ. of Adelaide) provide insight into the thinking (or lack of it) of the British high command and politicians in initiating an offensive against the Germans, who occupied large areas of France and Belgium. Although bloody Allied offenses in 1915 and at the Somme in 1916 had failed to dislodge the Germans, Britain's general Sir Douglas Alexander Haig planned a massive new attack for 1917. The authors contend that Haig could not have proposed another offensive without at least the silent consent of Prime Minister Lloyd George, the War Cabinet, the War Policy Committee in London, and the French generals. In any event, taking the Ypres salient and the Passchendaele ridge, the British suffered 275,000 casualties in four months of bitter fighting, without succeeding in capturing the channel ports. The third battle of Ypres was fought on the worst possible terrain for the attacking British and under the least favorable conditions: The low-lying ground was swampy and thick with mud in a heavy rainfall, with drainage systems destroyed by massive artillery barrages (as the authors describe, some wounded died of drowning in shell-holes). The battle was the ultimate Pyrrhic victory: Haig claimed victory on the short advance while losing one-sixth of the British Army. The authors argue that Lloyd George was irresponsible for not earlier relieving Haig, who seemed indifferent to the loss of human life. According to the authors, desertion, drunkenness, and psychological disorders became rampant, and lasting bitterness spread to the civilian population when British soldiers came home. A finely researched analysis of what happened to a lost generation of youth, badly used by callous generals. (History Book Club selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-300-06692-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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 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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