by Thaddeus Holt ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2004
Absorbing, if surely long: just the thing for military-intelligence buffs and students of WWII history.
Massive history of Allied intelligence in WWII, focusing on the misinformation and disinformation that helped assure the success of Torch, Overlord, and other critical operations.
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan may have proved ferociously powerful foes in battle, but behind the scenes their intelligence networks were surprisingly vulnerable. Writes Holt, an attorney and former undersecretary of the Army: “Of the three Axis intelligence services, the elaborate but poorly managed German system was the most successfully deceived. Deception efforts against the Japanese fell on stony ground, for their even more elaborate system was too incompetent to understand what was being told them, and stood too low in the estimation of the decision-makers for it to have done much good if they had.” The Italians were far better, Holt says, but Italy was not often the target of counterintelligence efforts. Thanks to such vulnerabilities, Allied agents were able to spread misleading information across many theaters of combat, sometimes using ruses of surprising simplicity—a planted briefcase carrying forged papers here, a carefully inaccurate, tapped telephone conversation there—but more often using diabolically clever stratagems. Holt’s history is dense with data, acronyms, and bits of logistics, and it would make for tedious reading were its pages not populated by altogether dashing figures, among them Peter Fleming, the spymaster brother of James Bond novelist Ian, who cooked up two-birds-with-one stone deceptions “at least some of which the Germans passed on to the Japanese”; Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the movie star turned commando and lethal gadget maker; Harold Burris-Meyer, a stereo-sound pioneer who worked on Disney’s Fantasia and who in wartime experimented with “sonic bombs” and sonic deception; Dudley Clarke, a British bon vivant who had “an uncanny habit of suddenly appearing in a room without anyone having noticed him enter it” and seems to have truly enjoyed engineering mayhem. As he and his cohort did, sting-by-sting and operation-by-operation, concocting hoaxes, rumors, phony documents, and misleading plans by the gross.
Absorbing, if surely long: just the thing for military-intelligence buffs and students of WWII history.Pub Date: June 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5042-7
Page Count: 1184
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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