by Tim Tate ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2019
An engaging work of World War II history.
A prolific British documentary filmmaker and author pursues the documentation released between 2000 and 2017 by MI5 and other entities that reveals the mostly secret convictions of a considerable number of British spies during World War II.
Despite what England has publicly presented—that the so-called Fifth Column was a myth and the threat of “enemies within” just hysteria—Tate (Pride: The Unlikely Story of the True Heroes of the Miner's Strike, 2018, etc.) returns to the record to tell a different story. He underscores three elements: that the majority of spies for Nazi Germany were not German immigrants but British citizens; that those punished were of lower class than the aristocratic ringleaders at the top; and that much of the evidence of convictions was buried or covered up for decades. Tate looks at several espionage networks, many developed in small towns around regular kinds of people who became radicalized by infiltrations of resourceful German intelligence agents in Britain in its plan to invade the country in the late 1930s. Britain did not have a functioning anti-espionage law until August 1939, when Parliament enacted an Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, allowing a classification system (regarding the level of threat) for non-naturalized Germans living in the country. By May 1940, the House of Commons passed the Treachery Act, dispensing the death penalty for treason. The pool of big fish, “the key pillars of British society,” contained plenty of rabid anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi figures, such as Oswald Mosely and his British Union and Archibald Ramsay and his Right Club, which was plotting a coup to replace the government with Nazi sympathizers. While the latter retained his seat in the House of Commons, many little fish were severely punished, even hanged. From the internment of suspects, the British eventually turned to a more covert form of entrapment: the sting operation. In true documentarian fashion, the author relentlessly brings forth evidence that has long been buried.
An engaging work of World War II history.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-077-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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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