A pragmatic scholarly study that fills in some gaps in the Holocaust literature.
An exploration of Holocaust survivors who collaborated with the Nazis, a history that shows “the spectrum of possible types of victims in the Holocaust.”
These are stories of those who served on Jewish councils and police set up by the Nazis and the kapo, a prisoner who supervised other prisoners. Porat (Education/Hebrew Univ.; The Boy: A Holocaust Story, 2010) cites so many instances of the search for scapegoats and the gray zone between the perpetrators and the oppressed that one wonders why it took so long to uncover the full details of these “kapo trials.” The author shows how the trials went through phases, from an initial assessment of Jewish functionaries as equivalent to Nazis to a final perception of them as victims. To deal with accusations and disputes at the end of the war, displaced-persons camps set up honor courts. These courts had no law or statute to rely on and focused on morality and general principles of jurisprudence. Beginning in 1944, there was increasing violence across Palestine, with calls for a court. Police could arrest someone who was accused but were often forced to release them due to lack of a relevant law, and Israel couldn’t prosecute for crimes committed in another country. That situation continued until 1950, when the Knesset passed the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law, which served as the basis for the Eichmann trial. In addition to chronicling the history of the kapo trials and their aftermath, Porat deals with the concept of Israelis as eternal victims and victimhood being used to define their psyche. The author explains the philosophies and procedures involved in a way that encourages readers to see all sides. “As the cases of Jewish functionaries demonstrate,” writes Porat, “the camps contained not only victims and perpetrators but also those who lived in the gray zone.”
A pragmatic scholarly study that fills in some gaps in the Holocaust literature.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-674-98814-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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 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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