A powerful study of armored warfare, from the introduction of the tank by the British army at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917 through Desert Storm in 1991. Donnelly (Operation Just Cause, 1991), Naylor (a staff writer for the Army Times), and editor Boyne (Clash of Wings, 1994) combine their efforts in a study of the tank and its primary features—mobility, firepower, and shock value in combat—as applied in armored warfare by the armies of Britain, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the US, and Israel. While the tank is a fearsome weapon, unsupported tanks are vulnerable. The authors illustrate both the effectiveness and vulnerability of tanks with several examples of their use by and against Nazi forces: The first masters of tank warfare, Guderian and Rommel, perfected the ``blitzkrieg'' (lightning war), which integrated air power, artillery, and infantry with tanks in a technique that combined speed and force to overwhelm enemy forces at their weakest points. In the Battle of France (1940), an outnumbered panzer force conquered France in six weeks. Rommel's use of supported tanks in his Africa campaigns (194142) was similarly successful, until his forces ran out of fuel and tank parts and had to face a more powerful British force. At the battle of Kursk (1943), overconfident German forces were stopped by an enormous number of heavy Soviet tanks in the greatest tank battle in history. The authors argue that Israeli tank commanders copied Rommel's tactics successfully in the 1967 and 1973 wars, crushing their opponents. Armored warfare reached its zenith in the Gulf War in 1991, when US and British armor, with cutting-edge technology, made scrap metal out of Iraqi tanks, proving that the tank remains a crucial element in military strategy. An effective study of one of modern warfare's most awesome weapons.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-425-15307-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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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