A fresh, closely argued interpretation of a global conflict that continues to reverberate.
A view of World War II as the child of colonialism and the father of superpower neo-imperialism.
“The last time that a world leader launched a war to dominate Eastern Europe and a rising Asian power sought to challenge American power in the Pacific, it led to the bloodiest war in human history.” So, with an eye on the present, ventures Columbia University historian Chamberlin in closing his sweeping survey of World War II. Fittingly, that narrative begins with World War I and its antecedent conflicts in Africa, where the European colonial powers and the U.S. tested techniques and strategies that would come to full fruition a generation or two later: concentration camps, poisonous gas, aerial bombardment of civilian populations. In this regard, Chamberlin dismantles the “good war” narrative so cherished by celebrants of the “greatest generation”: World War II had “overarching moral clarity,” but it had plenty of ignoble aspects. One, Chamberlin notes at the outset, was contingency planning on the part of the U.S. and Britain to immediately rearm German soldiers and go to war with the Soviet Union; another was the prewar expansion of American power deep into the Pacific, the result of a racist view that assumed that it was the white man’s role to lead the world (Japan, an allied power, was explicitly denied racial equality in the Treaty of Versailles). In the end, Chamberlin argues, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the European fight, losing millions of soldiers, while the U.S. bore the brunt of the Pacific War but relied on technological superiority to bomb Japan into submission. The outcome: a postwar world order dominated by those militarized superpowers and their satellites, “forced to prepare for perpetual warfare and the prospect of nuclear annihilation.”
A fresh, closely argued interpretation of a global conflict that continues to reverberate.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781541619265
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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