A deeply researched work that passionately challenges the popular myth that “the German people followed Hitler as if as one...
Stirring portraits of a motley assortment of unlikely heroes in the fight against the Nazis.
Recently deceased investigative reporter and author Thomas and documentary filmmaker and journalist Lewis (co-authors: Shadow Warriors of World War II: The Daring Women of the OSS and SOE, 2017) plunge readers directly into the action, offering an entertaining account of the diverse group of people who managed to subvert the Nazi intentions in some way. The authors move chronologically, from Hitler’s assumption of the chancellorship in early 1933 and the first demonstrations of brutal Nazi tactics to the cataclysmic end of the war. The public burning of books alarmed American-born academic Mildred Fish-Harnack, who was married to a senior German economics official, Arvid Harnack. With her friends, they galvanized sympathetic colleagues against the regime, providing secrets to the Americans and to the Soviets in the form of the Rote Kapelle group. The authors note that 45 people connected to that group were “sentenced to death,” and Mildred was “the first and only American woman executed on the order of Hitler.” Within the official Nazi apparatus, Gen. Hans Oster was working against the grain, with ambivalent Adm. Wilhelm Canaris looking the other way. In a very strange case, Kurt Gerstein reluctantly joined the SS and became one of the first to reveal the horrific inner workings of the concentration camps. Most poignantly, the authors delineate the courageous work of the young Munich students Hans and Sophie Scholl and others, whose White Rose group prevailed at least for a short time. The authors also recount the valiant, failed attempt by the group led by Col. Henning von Tresckow and Col. Claus von Stauffenberg to assassinate Hitler. All paid dearly for their brave defiance.
A deeply researched work that passionately challenges the popular myth that “the German people followed Hitler as if as one mass, mesmerized like the children of Hamelin by the Pied Piper.”Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-48904-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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