A painfully revealing, vital history.
A significant new history of the Holocaust from the director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway.
Stone, a professor of modern history and author of The Liberation of the Camps, emphasizes that we must stop thinking about the Holocaust as solely a German affair. “The genocide of the Jews,” he writes, “could not have been so thorough and so brutal without almost ubiquitous collaboration across Europe and beyond.” Historians agree that the trauma of Germany’s World War I defeat led to a legion of revanchist splinter groups. The Nazis were not taken seriously until 1932, when they became Germany’s largest party, and Hitler took power peacefully in 1933. No one has yet explained his obsessive hatred of Jews, but his party—and most Germans—went along. Stone delivers a gripping account of prewar Nazi legal persecution. About half of Germany’s Jews fled before emigration was banned in October 1941, although many found refuge in neighboring countries “that were later occupied.” Mass murder began with the 1939 invasion of Poland, and Stone’s blow-by-blow account may be more distressful than previous ones because he refutes their myths. Nearly half of the victims died of starvation or disease or were shot in “face-to-face killings reminiscent of colonial massacres.” In the gas chambers, victims died in agony, but fanatics such as the SS did not do all the work. Ordinary civilians and soldiers participated with frightening enthusiasm. Years later, many decent people claimed that refusing would have provoked terrible retaliation, but that is a myth. No group or country that declined to cooperate suffered. Stone concludes that today, “fascism is not yet in power. But it is knocking on the door.” The solution, he writes, is not necessarily more Holocaust education, unless it addresses a society that takes equality and tolerance for granted.
A painfully revealing, vital history.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780063349032
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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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