A valiant but not fully successful attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of “Hitler’s pope.”
A defense of the pope who got a bad rap for his public silence on Jewish persecution in Rome during World War II.
While reading prolific English writer Thomas’ (Operation Exodus: From the Nazi Death Camps to the Promised Land, 2010, etc.) dramatized account of Pius XII’s backroom dealing to help the Jews, readers come away with the impression that the new pope was endowed with a mission by the moribund Pius XI on his deathbed to campaign against anti-Semitism and subsequently pursued little else during the duration of the war. Yet Pius XII deliberately resolved that “there must be no public denunciation by the church” of Nazi persecution, supposedly to work more effectively behind the scenes for Jews to escape and also to sustain the tenuous Vatican neutrality. In his episodic, fast-paced narrative, Thomas cuts among scenes involving an array of international characters who were agitating against the Nazis during the war years, such as the leaders of Rome’s ancient Jewish ghetto, British and American diplomats, members of the anti-fascist resistance, spies and helpful Vatican priests. Events move at a breakneck pace, from Mussolini’s embrace of Nazi Germany, bombing by the Americans, the Abwehr director Wilhelm Canaris’ courting of the pope for a secret assassination plot of Hitler, and Hitler’s own crazy plot to abduct the pope. The plot culminated in the extortion of gold from the Jewish community and the horrific Gestapo roundup of thousands of Jews in October 1943. And still the pope remained silent. Thomas offers secondhand accounts such as by Pius’ devoted Bavarian housekeeper Sister Pascalina Lehnert, and though many illustrious voices have defended the pope’s record, it is not all entirely convincing.
A valiant but not fully successful attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of “Hitler’s pope.”Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-60421-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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