The style is traditional, even stodgy, while the discoveries may be revolutionary in World War I historiography.
A doctoral candidate and senior paralegal debuts with a sharp look at the so-called “Christmas truce” of 1914, discovering that distortion has colored many accounts of it—and of World War I itself.
In a text adapted from her master’s thesis, Crocker displays some things clearly. First, she did an enormous amount of work for that degree, reading countless books, newspaper accounts, diaries, and letters of those involved (almost entirely those of the English military) and watching films (documentary and otherwise) that involve the celebrated truce. Second, she did sufficiently transform the organization and tone from a graduate school exercise. She retains the well-used format of introduction-body-conclusion; she provides far more examples for each of her points than is necessary; she repeats and summarizes too much; her attitude remains generally detached and scholarly. Still, Crocker has created a work perhaps powerful enough to alter the conventional narrative of the incident. She destroys a number of misconceptions. Discovering considerable newspaper coverage from late 1914 and even into 1915, she demonstrates with great clarity that the soldiers involved were generally not dissuaded from socializing with the enemy by their commanding officers (and there were no punishments in the aftermath), proving with ample evidence that the combatants involved (on the English side) were not using the informal truces up and down the trenches to engage in some sort of anti-war protest. The author also expands her scope to show that the current dominant story of World War I—that incompetent commanders sent waves of young men to the slaughterhouse and that the entire war was not only ill-fought, but was a principal cause of World War II—is based more on tradition and myth than on fact. A storm of debate will no doubt ensue.
The style is traditional, even stodgy, while the discoveries may be revolutionary in World War I historiography.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8131-6615-5
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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