A remarkable work and an essential document in the vast library devoted to the Shoah.
A moving scholarly detective story that hinges on an iconic photograph from the Holocaust.
Porat (Holocaust Studies/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) writes that “it is the responsibility of a historian to narrate photographs with analytic rigor, even while retaining, and indeed deepening, their immediacy and meaning.” He succeeds admirably in his critical evaluation of the photograph, taken during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, which depicts an eight-year-old boy, hands raised, his face a study in fear and terror. To his right, a young woman, hands also raised and apparently at the head of a column of prisoners, looks at him with concern, while behind him, a Nazi soldier keeps a rifle at the ready. In an exemplary campaign of research, the author doggedly pursues their stories, as well as those of the man behind the camera and the official who ordered that these images be made. The last was a Nazi SS officer named Josef Stroop, once an aimless World War I veteran, then a Nazi true believer, who kept a careful, ornately bound chronicle of his actions on the Eastern Front. Even Nazi leader Alfred Jodl condemned the excess: “The dirty arrogant SS swine! Imagine writing a 75-page boastful report on a little murder expedition, when a major campaign fought by soldiers against a well-armed enemy takes only a few pages!” The photographer also found his calling in the SS, as did the guard with the rifle, a sad sack who was initially appalled at the work of the death squads but soon shed his scruples. Each of the Nazis was executed in the years following the armistice, and only a few of the Jewish figures survived the war, which they carried with them forever.
A remarkable work and an essential document in the vast library devoted to the Shoah.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8090-3071-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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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