A thrilling work of historical scholarship, thoughtful and scrupulous.
A nonfiction book offers a meticulous account of the assassination of a prominent Socialist by right-wing terrorists during the Nazi occupation of France.
Once France’s Third Republic was replaced by an authoritarian Vichy Regime, the future prospects of Marx Dormoy seemed inauspicious. He was a famous French Socialist politician who vehemently opposed an appeasement with the Germans. He also waged a relentless and ultimately successful takedown of the “Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire,” colloquially known as the Cagoule, right-wing extremists who supported the replacement of the republic with a Mussolini-style Fascist regime. Dormoy was arrested and confined to the town of Montélimar in 1941 by dint of an order signed by Maréchal Philippe Pétain. Then on July 26 of that year, Dormoy was assassinated—a powerful bomb was planted in his hotel room. Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite provide a dizzyingly painstaking investigation of the crime and its perpetrators, demonstrating conclusively that it was executed by members of the Cagoule and likely had support from high-ranking officials within the Vichy government. The authors limn a remarkably precise anatomy of the “politically dangerous” police investigation that ensued as well as a lucid and moving synopsis of Dormoy’s courageously patriotic life, which ended with an “ignominious demise.”
At the heart of this gripping historical study is a portrait of a frighteningly divided France beset by political polarization, a nation that continued to struggle with those fissures after the war. Dormoy’s “life, death, and legacy is also the story of the struggle over the ways in which French people chose to remember, or forget, the last decade of the feeble Third Republic and the terrible war years as they sought to build a new France after the Liberation, a France that, it must be remembered, exonerated many, if not most, for their wartime crimes.” In fact, even the erection of a statue of Dormoy in Montluçon years later proved controversial. The same France that could not bring all of the politician’s murderers to justice found that it could not fully grapple with the meaning of his life: “Dormoy was largely forgotten by 1950 because France needed to recover from the trauma of the war and construct a consensus about French identity that required a selective amnesia about the troubled 1930s and the war years. The very existence of a French ‘civil war’ needed to be elided from historical memory in order to avoid the same conflicts that rent France before the war from breaking out again once peace in Europe had been restored.” As impressive as the account of Dormoy’s death and the portrait of his life are, the intellectual backbone of this marvelously edifying book remains the nuanced articulation of France’s identity crisis, one not resolved but rather repressed in the wake of its wartime trauma. At some points, readers may feel buried under a pile of minutiae—the authors spare no details, often packaged within long, cascading paragraphs. But this is a minor quibble—this magisterial study deserves and amply repays readers’ patient labors.
A thrilling work of historical scholarship, thoughtful and scrupulous.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4875-8837-3
Page Count: 328
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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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