Groom brings little news, but that may be beside the point; he means the book, it appears, to make “the average American...
Novelist-historian Groom (A Storm in Flanders, 2001; etc.) turns his hand to WWII, with mixed results.
The time was what namesake Winston Churchill called “the hinge of fate”: In the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor bombing and the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, the Axis seemed in great danger of achieving global dominance. Thanks to the Red Army on the eastern front, British forces in North Africa and island-hopping U.S. marines, soldiers and sailors in the Pacific, that overarching victory was denied, but at terrific cost. Groom apparently has little interest in the contribution of non-English speakers to the struggle; “In 1942,” he writes of the U.S.-U.K. alliance, “it was basically these two great powers that fought the war on the razor’s edge against the Axis cabal.” Try telling that to, oh, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: but no matter, for in Groom’s version there is not much room for fine distinctions, and so here sniveling Uruguayans wait for signs of certain Allied victory before joining the cause, while evil Black Shirts go about beating up whomever they please—all good for a period sequel to Casablanca, but a little light for a serious book written half a century after the fact. Still, there are shining moments here. Groom’s brief account of the spy ring that broke Vichy naval codes, for instance, is worth a movie of its own. His rebuke to ideologically motivated writers who suggest that FDR knew of the impending Japanese attack is a pleasure: “To follow all the arguments suggesting that Roosevelt conspired to let the Pacific command be surreptitiously attacked by the empire of Japan is exceedingly tedious and in the end wasteful because it denies simple logic.” And his account of the Guadalcanal campaign is full of vivid if often quite gruesome vignettes of battle.
Groom brings little news, but that may be beside the point; he means the book, it appears, to make “the average American reader” feel a little better about the present war on terror. Skillfully written, but not his best effort.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-87113-889-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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