A no-frills oral history of Operation Overlord that, for all its considerable virtues, falls short of the high standard set by other books commemorating the 50th anniversary of the invasion. Drez is assistant director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, which for more than 10 years has been collecting memoirs from lower-echelon veterans of the Anglo- American and Canadian forces who participated in the mid-1944 invasion of occupied Europe that signaled the beginning of the end for Hitler's Third Reich. He has used excerpts from the biographical material supplied by approximately 150 of the archive's 1,440-odd contributors to stitch together a vivid if limited version of the D-day story. His roster of sources, which encompasses Wehrmacht defenders and members of the French resistance as well as Allied troops, is at least representative, but Drez offers barely enough background information to keep the narrative comprehensible. In their set-piece testimony, the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who assaulted coastal France's strongly fortified beaches (in many cases after rides across the English Channel on landing craft whose violent maneuverings left them seasick) or dropped behind German lines under cover of darkness provide graphic accounts of the horrors experienced by combatants at the sharp end of the bayonet in Normandy. Without a big-picture perspective from Drez, however, readers unfamiliar with events could come away with precious little sense of the occasion that demanded such fearful sacrifices. Nor does the editor offer even a summary briefing on what happened to his valiant subjects in the European theater of operations or elsewhere after their first 24 hours ashore. Affecting reminiscences from the survivors of a famous victory afford a kaleidoscopic first-draft reckoning of its appalling costs.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8071-1902-4
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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