A detailed account of the tank battles in Normandy after D-Day when British, Canadian, Polish, and French forces moved off their landing beach sectors to meet the best of Nazi Germany's elite professionals—the Waffen SS Panzer Corps. Reynolds, a retired British major general and former high- ranking NATO officer (The Devils Adjutant, 1995, etc.), focuses on the makeup of the feared SS units that stopped the Allied advances and threatened to drive the citizen soldiers back into the sea. Though fighting for one of the most brutal regimes of all time, they were considered some of the best troops in modern times. The early Waffen SS selectees were highly motivated teenagers who were trained to excel in obedience and self-sacrifice. Pride, courage, and mastery of the best weapons and tactics in tank warfare were stressed. Most of their officers rose from the ranks as highly decorated, battle-hardened veterans. In addition, the American Sherman tanks were no match for the German Tiger and Panther tanks. The SS units inflicted heavy losses on the Allies and, when his forces failed to move forward at Caen, almost caused Gen. Montgomery to be replaced. Massive Allied air power and devastating naval gunfire helped to save the day, destroying German strongholds, equipment, and supplies and ending a bloody war of attrition. Reynolds describes the failure of the Allies at Falaise to seal off the German retreat but believes that it was the fierce Panzer counterattack rather than Allied bungling that spared the Germans. Reynolds seems to give less credit to the American GIs, disregarding Patton's destruction of the German left wing, which forced the enemy to flee toward Falaise, as well as the key American seizures of crucial terrain at Cherbourg and in Brittany. A British view of the Normandy battles, and a well researched narrative drawing heavily on German as well as Allied archives. (Military Book Club selection)
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-885119-44-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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