A well-told story from a little-known corner of World War II history.
Celebration of a hero of the Polish resistance during World War II—whose work, because she was a woman, was long obscured.
Elzbieta Zawacka, writes historian and BBC commentator Mulley, was the only woman ever to be enlisted in the elite special forces of the Polish army in exile, who was parachuted into her Nazi-occupied homeland to help organize resistance fighters. As Mulley notes, some 40,000 women became members of the Polish Home Army, but none had an official rank and usually fulfilled jobs thought suitable for women—typing, cooking, nursing, and the like. “Zo,” her code name, championed women’s rights as well as antifascism. Before the war, she had trained in mathematics, and, “unmarried at thirty and choosing to live alone, she was already raising eyebrows.” Yet, of more or less ordinary appearance, she was able to blend into the crowd, which helped as she crossed the borders between Poland, Germany, and other nations more than 100 times, carrying messages as a courier. “Serious, stern, tough and very matter of fact,” as a comrade described her, Zo helped organize the Warsaw uprising and, against all the odds, survived years of being hunted by the Gestapo. When the Soviets arrived, however, the Polish resistance was suppressed and its leaders arrested. Zo was arrested too, “each investigation leading to further interrogations,” and finally sentenced to seven years of imprisonment, during which time she taught math to inmates and guards alike. Freed, she mounted a campaign of noncompliance, saying, “There is nothing they can do to me.” Among her other accomplishments was public commemoration of the Home Army, part of “a chain of defiance leading inexorably to Poland’s return to independence”—after which, in belated acknowledgment, she was honored with the rank of brigadier general.
A well-told story from a little-known corner of World War II history.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781639367627
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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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