A comprehensive, encyclopedic work that should be included in the collections of libraries, schools and other institutions.
A harrowing, thorough study of the Nazi camps that gathers a staggering amount of useful and necessary information on the collective catastrophe.
In a tightly organized, systematic narrative, Wachsmann (Modern European History/Birkbeck Coll., Univ. of London; Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany, 2004, etc.) presents an “integrated” treatment of the Konzentrationslager of the title that moves beyond any attempt to endow the camps with universal meaning. He looks at forces both inside and outside the camps, from Hitler’s ascension in early 1933 to the liberation by the Allies in the spring of 1945. The author tries to move away from looking at the camps as occupying “some metaphysical realm” and stick to primary sources that reveal the voices of the prisoners and the perpetrators. To deal with the mass arrest of Hitler’s enemies in the spring and summer of 1933, the earliest camps morphed from existing workhouses and state prisons located all over Germany (Wachsmann provides maps of the camps as they evolved over the years), housing mostly political prisoners and communists, with Jews constituting only a small percentage, to a template fixed at Dachau, which SS leader and Munich police president Heinrich Himmler established as the “first concentration camp.” Schooled in brutal, bloodthirsty methods, the guards were encouraged to treat the prisoners as animals, running the camps in relentless military fashion, employing routine terror, forced labor and euphemisms regarding the murders of inmates as “suicides” and “shot trying to escape” for PR purposes. The camp system grew with the purge of SA leader Ernst Röhm and other “renegades” in July 1934 and took off with the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, after which Jews numbered predominately. As the war progressed, so did the methods of mass extermination, from mass shootings to the Auschwitz gas chamber: first weak prisoners, then Soviet POWs, then Jews.
A comprehensive, encyclopedic work that should be included in the collections of libraries, schools and other institutions.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0374118259
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
HISTORY | MILITARY | JEWISH | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
PERSPECTIVES
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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