Few historians deny that the destruction of the dams gave an immense boost to British morale and inflicted costly damage to...
In May 1943, 19 British heavy bombers flew a dangerous, nighttime mission at treetop level to attack three German dams. It succeeded, and British historian Holland (The Battle of Britain: Five Months that Changed History, 2011) delivers an extremely detailed but never dull account of its tortuous history.
Few military missions stem from the idea of a single man, and a civilian at that, but that’s the case with Barnes Wallis (1887–1979), the assistant chief designer at Vickers Aviation during World War II and a prolific inventor. In 1942, he conceived of a huge bomb dropped from a plane that would skip across the water, over a torpedo net, and strike a heavy target such as a ship or dam. In the book’s first section, Holland recounts Wallis’ efforts to win over military and civilian leaders. In the second section, the author describes a frantic three months of planning, training and construction of the bomb and the plane modifications necessary to deliver it. The raid itself was definitely not anticlimactic. Bombs destroyed two dams, producing disastrous floods over a huge area. Eight bombers were lost; the remaining crew returned as heroes, and the mission remains an icon in British memories of World War II. While the 1955 movie, starring Richard Todd and Michael Redgrave, ended in triumph, the reality was less dramatic. Damage was enormous, although most of the dead were forced laborers and POWs. Conventional bombing would have hindered Germany’s massive repair effort, but none took place, and the dams were operating by September.
Few historians deny that the destruction of the dams gave an immense boost to British morale and inflicted costly damage to the Nazis, and Holland offers a definitive, nuts-and-bolts history.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2169-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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