Boyne’s skills as a battlefield analyst will make this of interest to military professionals, as well as to students of the...
A brow-moistening tale of nuclear brinksmanship, high-level diplomacy, and an all but forgotten war.
In 1973, on the holiest day of the Jewish year, Syrian and Egyptian forces crossed the Golan Heights and the Sinai Desert in a blinding, surprise assault on Israel on two fronts. Their commanders operated on the premise, formulated by Anwar Sadat, that they could “offset superior Israeli airpower and armor by replying on a superabundance of Soviet-supplied missiles,” and in this they were initially correct; the Israeli forces were repelled everywhere, and military leaders Ariel Sharon and Moshe Dayan feared that Israel would soon have to sue for peace. Deliverance came, writes retired Air Force officer and military historian Boyne (Beyond the Wild Blue, 1997, etc.), in the form of a massive American military airlift called Operation Nickel Grass, using techniques that had been perfected in the 1948 relief of the Soviet blockade of Berlin. The Soviets were none too pleased at the thwarting of their ambitions in the Middle East, especially after the Syrian and Egyptian leadership split on the matter of a cease-fire; that disagreement had the effect, among other things, of drawing Egypt into closer cooperation with America, which would bear fruit a few years later in the Camp David accords. Drawing on newly declassified documents, Boyne shows how close that displeasure, matched with Richard Nixon’s paranoia in those days of Watergate, came to producing the hard rain of nuclear war. More than that, Boyne does a fine job of recounting the Yom Kippur War and of correcting the historical record to acknowledge the important work of the US Military Air Command in bringing it to an end.
Boyne’s skills as a battlefield analyst will make this of interest to military professionals, as well as to students of the Cold War and Middle Eastern affairs.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-27303-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 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
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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