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 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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