A moving, inspiring account of the indomitability of the human spirit.
A heart-rending biography of a young teenager who lived under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands.
Robbert Van Santen, a Jewish young man growing up in Amsterdam during World War II, presciently interpreted Kristallnacht as an ominous portent of what was to come. Soon afterward, the Germans invaded his town, quickly forcing the Dutch military to surrender. Van Santen, a social worker who was once a schoolmate of Anne Frank, was given an exemption by the Nazis from prohibitive rules that would have greatly restricted his movement about the city. In exchange for that measure of liberty, however, he was witness to the chilling depredations man can heap upon man. He saw his neighbors gradually vanish, shuttled to concentration camps to labor and die. He witnessed a pregnant woman being summarily executed in a movie theater for her hysterical expression of grief. Eventually, Van Santen’s home was raided, and he fled to a distant town, finally going into hiding, and then joined the resistance movement. But even before he took up arms against the Nazis, he staunchly refused victimhood. Despite his parlous circumstances, he still sought out romance, like any teenager, and briefly found it, but his young love, too, was captured and deported. This biography, which covers Van Santen’s adolescence from ages 14 to 19, is based on conversations that he had with Comstock, a veteran writer (Global Partners: Citizen Exchange with the Soviet Union, 1987, etc.). Comstock composes the whole account in the first person, describing the nature of his exchange with Van Santen and their friendship. He also addresses the sheer terror that the Jewish people withstood, a trauma that haunted them in a way that mere physical wounds could not: “Anxiety about being betrayed or otherwise discovered is so intense that some Jews may feel it is almost less stressful to be caught; at least it would relieve the suspense.” The result is a gripping testimony not only to the dormant darkness that can be awakened in the hearts of men, but also the ways such darkness can be transformed into redemption.
A moving, inspiring account of the indomitability of the human spirit.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Willow Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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