Readers looking for dramatic accounts of specific bombing missions should read a selection of books by British military...
Historians still argue over how much, if at all, strategic bombing contributed to defeating Hitler. This magisterial overview will not end the debate, but it skillfully illuminates all sides.
Demonstrating his exhaustive research, Overy (History/Univ. of Exeter; 1939: Countdown to War, 2011) begins the first chapter, “Bombing Bulgaria,” with a description of a destructive campaign that undermined the pro-German government, which managed to persist until the Soviet army arrived. Few readers will ignore the lesson. Throughout World War II, British Bomber command believed that it could devastate the war-making capacities of the Nazis. Within months, losses forced a switch to nighttime bombing, which made accuracy nearly impossible. Overy delivers an insightful analysis of how all nations reversed their abhorrence of killing civilians when it became unavoidable. The British were not taking revenge for the Blitz; their conversion had already occurred. The United States assumed its more heavily armed bombers (with lesser payloads) could defend themselves during the day and hit targets precisely. Both beliefs proved wrong, but America stuck to daylight bombing despite terrible losses. Both nations exaggerated the damage that their bombers caused, but good evidence exists that a major effort against Nazi oil production caused crippling shortages during 1944 and 1945. Overy provides an eye-opening and often distressing account of the bombing of Europe’s occupied nations, whose defenses were far less prepared than Germany’s. More bombs fell on France and Italy than England. “The moral response to bombing and being bombed was historically complex and sometimes surprising,” writes the author.
Readers looking for dramatic accounts of specific bombing missions should read a selection of books by British military historian Martin Middlebrook. For a far more expansive view that includes those on the receiving end, Overy is the choice.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02515-2
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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 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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