An exciting, earnestly narrated World War II story.
Davis (editor: An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, 2010) tells the story of the Cretan soldiers who struck a blow to German morale during World War II.
Highlighted in a recent biography by Artemis Cooper, the life of Patrick Leigh Fermor was romantically restless, as he demonstrated early on when he resolved to walk across Europe at age 18. With the breakout of World War II, his knowledge of Greece landed him in a special-ops mission to the German-invaded Crete in order to carry out British espionage. Leigh Fermor cooked up the plot to abduct the occupying German Gen. Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller from the bath; he and his fellow agents had been deeply distraught by the crisis of Cretan occupation, brutally carried out by Müller. After being dropped by parachute on a plateau near the village of Kritsa in 1944, Leigh Fermor rendezvoused with the Cretan patrols and fellow British agent Billy Moss, after many setbacks, and waited for the opportune moment. Even though Müller had been replaced as general, the plan went forward by April. Wearing smuggled German military police uniforms, the two Englishmen, along with a ragtag group of locals, took up position on the route taken by the new general, Heinrich Kreipe, from his residence at Villa Ariadne, near Knossos, to his headquarters near Heraklion. As the two mock Germans stopped the car as part of a routine checkpoint, with Leigh Fermor speaking solid German, the general was seized, the driver knocked out and the car commandeered. After a long trek through goat trails in the mountains, hiding out from the enraged Germans, the group was finally picked up and conveyed to Cairo. It was an amazing abduction and rescue, offering the valiant Cretans renewed hope for liberation.
An exciting, earnestly narrated World War II story.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-46013-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 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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