A mixture of derring-do and a vivid, warts-and-all portrayal of the iconic castle.
Macintyre’s latest nonfiction thriller takes us inside a notorious Nazi prison.
World War II buffs know that Colditz was a castle deep inside Germany that housed Allied officer POWs who had tried repeatedly to escape. Numerous fictional portrayals of heroic prisoners outsmarting dastardly Nazis bear little relation to reality, but Macintyre tells an equally entertaining story that sticks to the facts. The author reminds readers that POW camps were run by the Wehrmacht, which mostly abided by the dictates of the Geneva Conventions. Prisoner abuse was rare, and escape attempts were punished by solitary confinement, not execution, although conditions deteriorated in the war’s final year. Guards tended to be older noncombatants or World War I veterans whose enthusiasm for Nazism varied. As for the POWs, assignment to Colditz was a sloppy process; many were not escapees and never joined escape plots. Courage was plentiful, but there were also plenty of negative elements among the prison population. British prisoners, almost all upper class, treated the enlisted men who served them shabbily. Antisemitism was common among the French, many of whom preferred Pétain to de Gaulle. Macintyre emphasizes that Colditz was a titanic castle but a poor prison, replete with passages, drains, cellars, abandoned sections, and locks that could be easily picked. Having set the scene, he devotes most of the narrative to escape attempts in which spectacularly creative prisoners vied with increasingly skilled guards, who learned from their mistakes. At any given time, several tunnels were in progress because prisoners from each nation had their own projects. Although dazzling technical achievements, almost all failed. The only successful operations involved individuals or small groups. Unlike many fictional portrayals, Macintyre chronicles what happened once the men were outside the walls. The Swiss border was 400 miles away, and almost every escapee was caught before reaching it. Perhaps 30 made it out of Germany.
A mixture of derring-do and a vivid, warts-and-all portrayal of the iconic castle.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-13633-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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
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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