A competent piece of historical detective work that is less satisfying as popular history.
An attempt to identify the true culprit behind the excessively bloody taking of a German fortress by green American forces at the tail end of World War I.
In his debut history, military historian Walker aims to settle a disputed incident in American military history that took place at the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in 1918. The 79th Division, which “had completed less than six weeks of the prescribed twelve weeks of combat training,” was given the difficult task of taking Montfaucon, a fortified butte serving as a valuable observation post for German artillery and known as “the Little Gibraltar of the Western Front” for its impenetrability. The battle-hardened 4th Division, by contrast, was given a relatively easy sector of the German lines to penetrate. Walker marshals exhaustive evidence suggesting that American planners intended to execute a “turning maneuver”: while the inexperienced 79th held the veteran defenders’ attention, the 4th would encircle the strong-point and force its surrender. The author argues that Maj. Gen. Robert E. Lee Bullard ignored this order, hoping to win glory by leading his corps, which included the 4th Division, further into German territory than any other American unit. Unfortunately, this “betrayal,” while undoubtedly of interest to soldiers of the 79th and military historians, seems insufficiently consequential to interest casual history buffs. Walker never fully demonstrates that capturing Montfaucon was as crucial to the (arguable) failure of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive as other factors mentioned by the author, including the American soldiers' inexperience, sophisticated German defenses, and outdated tactics encouraged by American commanders who “still worshiped the rifle and bayonet.” Furthermore, Walker leans too heavily on military history clichés, comparing the combatants to “depleted boxers” and quoting heavily from excellent but well-mined sources such as historian John Keegan.
A competent piece of historical detective work that is less satisfying as popular history.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1789-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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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