A story of hallucinatory grotesqueness told in an appalled voice that separates fact from rumor and grows rightfully angrier...
A tale of foul and petty mistrust, nastiness, corruption, and careerism that led to a man’s beheading and the incarceration of his charge, during the Nazi Nuremberg years.
A young German woman moved to Nuremberg in 1932. She was a bit of a free spirit, with a “somewhat impertinent sounding Brandenburg accent and the cheeky hats she wore imparted an exciting, exotic flair.” Irene Scheffler’s father had asked his friend Leo Katzenberger, a well-to-do Nuremberger in the shoe business, to look after her. He did just so: finding her an inexpensive apartment in one of his buildings, helping with her fledgling photography business, bestowing small treats and shoes from his warehouse. Such attention toward Scheffler “soon ran afoul of the several of the tenants’ sacred laws. She interfered with their need for order and unleashed feelings of envy.” It didn’t help that Katzenberger was a wealthy Jew living in a city experiencing economic difficulties and enrapt in Nazi propaganda. There is no evidence that Katzenberger and Scheffler had more than a platonic relationship, but their neighbors’ rumors blossomed into charges, from breaking purity laws to taking advantage of wartime circumstances to dally. Katzenberger was beheaded; Irene, for consorting with a Jew, was imprisoned. Der Spiegel editor Kohl does a fine and fierce job of letting this story unfold, complete with evil characters, from Julius Streicher (Nuremberg Nazi poo-bah) to the sentencing judge to venal informers and stalwart friends who tried to rid Katzenberger and Scheffler of their naïveté. Nuremberg was a hotbed of Nazi activity and ideology, and Kohl pulls that history ineluctably to its finish. She tells of the spat between Streicher and Hermann Goering, of the “Aryanization” laws that robbed the Jewish population of its property and livelihood, and the endless trail of dirty works that led to a good man’s guillotining.
A story of hallucinatory grotesqueness told in an appalled voice that separates fact from rumor and grows rightfully angrier until the very bitter end. (8 pp. b&w photographs)Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-58642-070-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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