An astute examination by an expert war historian that sifts through the collective “theatres of attrition” in this...
A rigorous look at the grinding war machine involved in the making of the Great War, both at home and on the battlefield.
Author of the authoritative Three Armies of the Somme (2010), Philpott (War Studies/ King’s Coll., London) plunges into the complicated factors that allowed the war of attrition, which had been used effectively since ancient times, to “come into its own” during World War I. The clash of the powerful industrialized armies created a three-year stalemate within the trenches of the western front in France, rather than a swift, decisive victory anticipated by the Central Powers by Christmas 1914. As such, the fighting required the strategic coordination of four other “fronts” in order to defeat the enemy: the maritime front, whereby Britain and Germany would contest superiority of the seas, most effectively through economic blockade; the home front, encompassing raw material resources and maintaining the wills of the populations to support the war; the diplomatic front, involving war and peace negotiations, including the introduction of President Woodrow Wilson’s appeals to “peace without victory” in 1917; and the “united front”—i.e., the ability of the cohorts to work together, as the Allies managed to do more effectively than the Central Powers. Philpott looks at how each engaged country addressed each front, from the shift from short-term thinking to long-term slog, as the old-style generals were learning that, as British Secretary for War John Seeley noted, “the armies have outgrown the brains of the people who direct them.” The author also addresses the “essential and practical” construction of the trench systems; the diversion of war materiel to the Middle East to fight Turkey, which was allied with Germany; and the manipulation of press and propaganda while mobilizing manpower and morale.
An astute examination by an expert war historian that sifts through the collective “theatres of attrition” in this unprecedented slaughter.Pub Date: May 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0268-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | 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 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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