A monumental, sobering attempt to make sense of collective insanity.
Within the extended scope of European history, coauthors of the acclaimed Auschwitz (2000) deliver a rigorously documented positioning of the persecution and murder of Jews prior to and during WWII.
Dwork (Holocaust History/Clark Univ.) and van Pelt (Cultural History/Univ. of Waterloo, Ontario) make judicious use of personal anecdotes plus numerous maps and photos to animate the retelling of events about which much has already been put on record. So contextually enhanced, detailed, and logically sequenced is this version, though, that even readers who have previously delved into the Holocaust may be shocked at how much remains to be dealt with. The ultimate Nazi brutalities, of course, cannot be enlarged upon, but a crucial role in their execution was played by hypocritical governments wedged between inflamed European nationalism and the specter of a new German war machine as Hitler rose to power after WWI. Among bureaucrats in countries threatened or occupied by the Nazis, the authors recount, phrases like “We did it to avoid worse” regularly justified anti-Semitic legislation and measures that would be later explained away as expedients never intended to be fully enacted. This “shield philosophy” thrived during WWII, they contend, “and always with bloody results.” Possibly more controversial will be the study’s historical groundings. The authors find a Holocaust harbinger in the Catholic Inquisition’s systematic, ruthless, and century’s-long hounding of such discrete “heretic” groups as “Hussites, Huguenots in France, Calvinists elsewhere.” They make an even more direct link to the Reign of Terror, during which French revolutionaries pronounced anyone of noble blood to be an obstacle to social and political change: “The line from regicide to Judeocide is direct indeed . . . foreshadowing Hitler’s murder of the Jews, whom he perceived as a barrier to racial utopia.”
A monumental, sobering attempt to make sense of collective insanity.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-393-05188-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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