In a global history of the Grand Alliance, military historian Breuer (Race to the Moon, 1993, etc.) shows that the shouting war that raged among Allied leaders was in its way almost as violent as the shooting one with the Axis. Although Churchill was thankful when the US joined the war, Breuer shows that the British leader's relationship with his new ally was stormy and tense from the outset. Breuer also draws an ugly picture of mutual recriminations, insults, and prickliness between the disdainful British military brass and their sometimes volatile American counterparts. The British, in Breuer's portrait, viewed the Americans as military bumpkins, unversed in the arts of war; the Americans in their turn saw their transatlantic brethren as arrogant, wedded to imperial glories of the past, and insufficiently appreciative of America's importance in the war effort. The stormy alliance was mitigated somewhat by the usually friendly relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt, though they did not entirely trust each other. According to Breuer, Roosevelt wanted to invade Normandy at an early date, while Churchill, despite surface agreement, wanted the Allies to snap at the fringes of the Third Reich and wait for a Soviet victory. Stalin disliked and distrusted both his capitalist counterparts, whom he saw as class enemies, but was allied with Roosevelt because he favored an early front in France. Everyone hated the self-important de Gaulle, and Breuer implies that British agents may have actually attempted to kill him. In addition, interservice rivalries, especially between the US Army and Navy, threatened to derail the American military. These national, interservice, and interpersonal rivalries and enmities shaped the war effort, dictating everything from the ``Germany first'' policy of the Allies to the decision to invade France. An absorbing look at the impact of Alliance politics on the outcome of WW II.
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-471-12252-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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