A history/biography of a group of courageous women spies in World War II.
Most military historians agree that the anti-Nazi resistance played a critical role in reviving defeated nations’ self-respect after the war but contributed only modestly to the Allied victory. Hollywood and popular writers often disagree, and their number includes journalist Rose (For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History, 2010). Working diligently in the archives, the author turns up stories of Frenchwomen who found themselves in England after the war’s outbreak and volunteered to return to France to organize resistance groups, gather intelligence, and direct sabotage. Hollywood’s version would begin with “based on a true story…” and then make wholesale changes. Forced to stick closer to the facts, Rose delivers a swift-moving account that makes for sometimes-painful reading. French volunteers in the Resistance were overwhelmingly amateurs; sadly, this was also true of Britain’s military Special Operations Executive, which, cheered on by Churchill, recruited, dispatched, and supplied agents. Definitely not amateurs, Gestapo counterintelligence officers monitored radio transmissions, broke codes, transmitted their own disinformation, and arrested agents regularly. By 1943, the heart of the French Resistance and many of Rose’s subjects had been arrested or killed. By 1944, the Allies had gotten their act together, parachuting men and adequate supplies into France in preparation for the Normandy landings. Sabotage from the newly energized Resistance, including a few of Rose’s survivors, made it more difficult to send German reinforcements across France, and its strength grew as enemy forces disintegrated. A skilled journalist but also a member of the history-is-boring school of writing, the author adds novelistic touches throughout, such as her subjects’ inner thoughts and emotions. Readers who tolerate this approach will encounter an expert blow-by-blow account of the surprisingly tedious, always dangerous, and mostly short lives of some heroic women.
A readable spy thriller that fights against the idea of “the original sin of women at war.”Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49508-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2019
Categories: HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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