A disturbing reevaluation of an iconic World War II battle, not definitely proven but well argued.
Unnerving findings about one of the great failed Allied operations of WWII.
On Sept. 17, 1944, Operation Market Garden landed a massive Allied force by parachute and glider behind German lines in Holland, and a British division launched an offensive from Belgium to link up. Success would entail outflanking German defenses, crossing the Rhine, and ending the war in 1944. It failed—resistance was far greater than expected. Historians fault poor terrain, bad weather, and faulty intelligence, but British journalist Verkaik, author of The Traitor of Colditz, is not the first to claim that traitors betrayed the effort. One candidate was Christiaan Lindemans, a legendary Dutch resistance fighter. Frequently arrested, resistance fighters often emerged from their interrogation as double agents, and Verkaik provides evidence supporting ongoing suspicions that Lindemans was among them. Turning to Britain, Verkaik writes that 24 hours before the operation, Nazi commanders received a warning from “a shadowy source deep in the heart of the British state, known…as Agent Josephine.” Although aware of “Josephine,” British intelligence never discovered her, possibly because a traitor led the search. That was Anthony Blunt, one of a crew of British communists who kept the USSR informed of Allied operations. With victory guaranteed, Stalin was more interested in slowing the Allies’ advance on Berlin than defeating Hitler. Market Garden’s failure (as well as December’s German Ardennes offensive) accomplished this, leaving the Red Army dominant in Eastern Europe and powerful communist parties in the west. Verkaik often overwhelms the reader with findings from archives, interviews, memoirs, letters, declassified MI5 and MI6 files, and postwar analyses that support, deny, or obfuscate the case for betrayal. He believes that Blunt was Josephine. His evidence is circumstantial, but there is plenty of it.
A disturbing reevaluation of an iconic World War II battle, not definitely proven but well argued.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781639368273
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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