A fascinating must-read for World War II aficionados.
A highly detailed account of the crucial week in February 1944 when American and British air forces conducted a series of air raids on German industrial and military targets.
Military historian and novelist Holland (The Allies Strike Back, 1941-1943, 2017, etc.) looks at the campaign both in its context as preparation for the Normandy invasion later that year and in its impact on the American, British, and German fighter and bomber crewmen who took part in it. In the fall of 1943, U.S. and British air corps generals were operating under the belief that the war could be won by bombing alone. To that end, they were running steady missions against German targets, with the U.S. bombing by daylight and the British at night. However, a shortage of long-range fighter planes meant that the bombers were exposed for much of their missions, and the resulting high attrition was unsustainable. Worse yet, unless the Luftwaffe could be reduced in strength, a successful Normandy invasion was a pipe dream. The answer came both in a change in tactics—making destruction of the Luftwaffe the top priority—and in the introduction of a new weapon, the P-51 Mustang long-range fighter. With the P-51 accompanying them, bombers could reach their German targets without leaving behind fighter protection, and the fighters, instead of shepherding the bombers to their targets, were set free to confront their Luftwaffe counterparts. All this came together in a week of raids in the third week of February 1944. Holland follows several individuals from all sides of the war, including Jimmy Stewart, who served as a major and flew several missions; Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, who took over command of the 8th Air Force; and German ace Heinz Knoke, who survived the war despite being shot down several times. The interplay of personal stories with the broader strategic picture makes the book especially illuminating, and the author also provides a few pages of helpful diagrams and maps.
A fascinating must-read for World War II aficionados.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2839-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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