Perhaps the fullest account yet to have appeared of the extraordinary network of Soviet spies in the Second World War known as Die Rote Kapelle—the Red Orchestra. Tarrant, a military advisor and naval historian, clarifies a good deal of the confusion that has existed about the three sectors in which the Orchestra operated: the network in France, Belgium, and Holland; the Berlin network; and the most remarkable of all, the group that operated out of Switzerland, the so-called Lucy Ring, whose sources included Lieut. General Fritz Theile, second- in-command of the German High Command's communications branch, and Baron Colonel Rudolf von Gersdorff, who was eventually to become Chief of Intelligence in one of the army groups on the Eastern front. The first two networks reported extraordinarily sensitive information from key areas of the German bureaucracy, but nothing compared to the work of the Lucy Ring, which gave Stalin the very date of the German attack on Russia, its objectives, and its strength. For reasons that still puzzle historians, Stalin refused to believe this information, but the Russians did not make this mistake a second time. The information that came from the headquarters of the German High Command enabled the Russians to surround the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad and to predict precisely the direction and strength of the German attack in the great tank battle of Kursk. Lucy's sources, writes Tarrant, ``were to cost the Germans the war on the Eastern Front.'' Most of the German officers were executed for their involvement in the 1944 Bomb Plot against Hitler, and the Swiss closed down the Lucy Ring, but by that time the fate of the Nazis was sealed. Using mostly secondary sources, but economically and vividly, Tarrant traces the rise and achievements of one of the most successful spy rings in history and the grim fate (imprisonment, torture, and execution) of some of its operatives.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-471-13439-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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