Although it fills no great need, this is an expert, anecdote-filled, thoroughly entertaining if heavily British-oriented...
A thick, sturdy history of World War II, beginning in 1941, the second in the author’s War in the West trilogy.
There is no shortage of multivolume general histories of WWII, but this is an illuminating read from a skilled historian. In 2015, Holland delivered 500 pages of The Rise of Germany, 1939-1941: The War in the West. In this even heftier second volume, the author begins at the traditional nadir of Allied (really British) fortunes just before Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941. Holland reminds readers that in the first volume, he argued that Germany was doomed from the beginning, and he has not changed his mind. Few scholars deny that Germany’s economy could not support a long war. Its vaunted technology was only a veneer because it lacked mass production capacity to make use of it. Even 6,000 superior tanks were no match for 50,000 Shermans. Furthermore, the potency of its mechanized army was greatly exaggerated. Not even 20 of the 135 divisions were mechanized in 1940, and soldiers remained dependent on horse transport to the end. Stripped of resources in 1940-1941, conquered nations provided little help afterward, while Britain’s empire and America poured out supplies. Having set the scene, Holland delivers a detailed, opinionated account of fighting in North Africa, the Atlantic submarine campaign, and the air war while acknowledging (and often describing) the far larger war in Russia. This second volume, once again helpfully illustrated with plenty of maps, ends two years after it begins, in May 1943, with the Axis surrender in Tunisia, its disastrous loss of a few dozen U-boats, and the first massive bomber missions. “Germany was running out of steam,” writes Holland. “Food, fuel, manpower—those three most important requirements for sustained modern warfare: there was not enough of any.”
Although it fills no great need, this is an expert, anecdote-filled, thoroughly entertaining if heavily British-oriented history of the war’s middle years.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2560-6
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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