The author says he eschewed traditional historiography because he wanted “to put readers in the action.” Despite some...
World War II historian Childers (Wings of Morning, 1995, etc.) employs with some success the techniques and diction of a novelist to tell the intertwining stories of an American B-17 pilot, a French schoolteacher, and a leader of the French underground.
The narrative begins in late 1943 as schoolteacher Colette Florin joins other companions in German-occupied France to direct the nocturnal landing of a small Allied plane. We then learn the background of Pierre Mulsant, a Frenchman trained in England for resistance work. Finally, we meet Roy Allen, a B-17 pilot from Philadelphia, who is shot down over France shortly after D-day and fears he is the only survivor. Florin hides the American in a room over the classroom where she teaches; Allen, unable to keep quiet, sings popular songs audible to the children below. Propinquity encourages the young people to develop an uneasy affection for each other. Both Allen and Mulsant are eventually nabbed by the Nazis in separate actions; both end up in Buchenwald. The Germans execute Mulsant, but Allen is bounced from camp to camp, enduring the agonies, cruelties, illnesses, and indignities so common in those fetid facilities. After the Liberation, Allen and Florin reunite briefly and share a passionate kiss before he returns to America, his wife, and the son who was born while he was a POW. Despite the kiss, it had been a chaste relationship, asserts the author, who notes that Allen’s widow and Florin continue to correspond regularly. (Roy died in 1991.) It’s evident that Childers (History/Univ. of Pennsylvania) knows his stuff: the Notes and Bibliography bristle with significant sources, and the entire volume communicates an impressive familiarity with the events of WWII, with the hellish milieus of concentration and POW camps, and with source material in English, French, and German.
The author says he eschewed traditional historiography because he wanted “to put readers in the action.” Despite some clichés and occasional mawkishness, he has indeed fashioned a crisp, compelling narrative. (8 pp. b&w photos, 3 maps, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-5752-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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