A stirring reconstruction of events, of much interest to military history buffs.
Following their collaboration on Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain (2000), Clayton and Craig study England’s military fortunes during the pivotal year 1942, drawing widely and wisely on the reminiscences of ordinary soldiers, sailors, and civilians.
Their account concentrates on the British campaign launched in late spring to destroy Erwin Rommel’s command in North Africa. Rommel’s Afrika Korps had been enjoying extraordinary success in the preceding months, as indeed had Axis armies everywhere: Hitler’s forces stood at the gates of Russia’s great cities, while Singapore and most of the islands of the Pacific had fallen to the Japanese. America’s armies had yet to enter the field in force; the English and their Commonwealth allies had had to bear the brunt of the fight alone. Yet, against the odds, they turned the tide of the war in North Africa by doggedly holding out at places like Tobruk and Malta, refusing to relinquish these thorn-in-the-side fortresses. Coupled with massive assaults on the German homeland—one British raid on Cologne resulted in “300 acres at the heart of a great modern city reduced to a pile of rubble”—and the steady destruction of the Italian and German Mediterranean surface fleets, the British command’s daring strategy in North Africa forced Rommel to stretch his lines of supply to the breaking point; midsummer found the German commander begging Hitler for reinforcements and materiel that never arrived. Even so, Rommel’s armies threatened to break through to Cairo as late as the fall, an eventuality for which some Egyptian shopkeepers prepared themselves, the authors note, by hanging out red-and-black Axis bunting that they would take down only with the great Allied victory in the epochal tank battle of October 23–November 4. “Before Alamein we never had a victory,” Winston Churchill observed. “After Alamein we never had a defeat.”
A stirring reconstruction of events, of much interest to military history buffs.Pub Date: March 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2325-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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