A thoroughgoing, sobering look at a horrific Faustian bargain.
From British journalist Jeffreys (Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, 2004), a walloping exposé of the chemical industry that funded the Nazi machine.
The creation of synthetic dyes, the development of aspirin and other great advances in chemistry and medicine from the mid-19th to 20th century were effected by the Germans, thanks to their technical training and abundance of coal for production, notes the author. Chemist Carl Bosch engineered the “fixing” of nitrogen, which led to the manufacture of synthetic fertilizer and the making of high explosives and mustard gas during World War I. In 1916, a cluster of German chemical firms including Bayer, BASF, Agfa and Hoechst united to form the cartel IG Farben, which grew into a colossus during the 1920s. Headed by Bosch, it pioneered the extraction of synthetic oil from coal along with a synthetic rubber (buna) that would pave the way for German self-sufficiency. Hitler commended the industry’s efforts, and IG Farben made huge donations to the newly powerful Nazi party, complying meekly with the purge of valuable Jewish scientists from its industries. Jeffreys doggedly pursues this dense and frequently bewildering story of tight-knit collaboration, which extended to such American companies as Standard Oil. IG Farben’s complicity fed the aggressive megalomania of Hitler, from the Four-Year Plan that directed all industry to serve the needs of the Reich, through the “wolverine speed” with which IG took over chemical plants in Poland and France once the Nazis rolled in, to the erection of a new buna factory manned by available slave labor at Auschwitz. Did IG’s managers know what was happening to the Jews in these factories of death? “The short, simple, and unequivocal answer is…yes,” writes Jeffreys, whose detailed examination of the facts decisively refutes “the blanket protestations of ignorance” made by IG’s chiefs after the war. Nonetheless, 24 IG executives evaded justice at Nuremberg, thanks to insufficient evidence.
A thoroughgoing, sobering look at a horrific Faustian bargain.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7813-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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