A recondite study, so subtly wrought as to be somewhat murky, traces the deeply divided allegiances and tortuous history of a once proud East Prussia.
A northern Baltic stronghold nestled presently between Gdansk, Poland, and Lithuania’s western border, East Prussia had been home to five centuries of highly evolved German civilization, from the crusading Teutonic Knights who wrested the land from the pagans, to the militarized aristocracy of Junkers from which the German army drew its officers. Bombed by the British in 1944 and overrun by the Red Army, its inhabitants fled westward, and the province was effectively depopulated of Germans and dismantled, becoming today’s haunted, uneasy blend of Russians, Poles and Lithuanians. Novelist and biographer Egremont (Siegfried Sassoon, 2005, etc.) tiptoes through this “whispering past” by seeking out some of the members of the old landowning families to get a sense of a previous vanished world: the Dönhoffs of Friedrichstein, the Lehndorffs of Steinort and the Dohnas of Schlobitten. For example, in 1992, the author interviewed politician and writer Marion Dönhoff, one of the founders of Die Zeit, whose memoirs serve as a key historical source. With a keen eye to uncovering history, Egremont studies a 1911 report made of the region by an English colonel, Alfred Knox, at the height of East Prussia’s efficient, militarized glory, when the port of Königsberg was thriving, the railroads criss-crossed the region and a sense of powerful new German nationalism prevailed, albeit tinged with an anxiousness about the threat of Russia. The German euphoria after the victory of Tannenberg in 1914 soon gave way to a shattering defeat and a collapse of many great houses. Treks by poet Agnes Miegel and novelist Thomas Mann also provided navigation through this place full of “old yearning.” The once stately Königsberg, home to Immanuel Kant, has become today’s scarred and “doomed” modern Russian metropolis of Kaliningrad, “a place of victims.” Ponderous, thickly detailed, somberly composed work joining travelogue and reflective history lesson.
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-15808-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
PROFILES
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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