A sensational reinterpretation of the evidence surrounding the death of Adolf Hitler. Thomas is a forensic expert who practices and teaches surgery in Great Britain. Here he proposes a radically different scenario concerning Hitler's death. For 50 years, most of the world has accepted the account offered by Hugh Trevor-Roper in The Last Days of Hitler: Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in the depths of the Berlin bunker, their bodies were taken outside by aides and set ablaze. The Soviets then arrived and took possession of the remains. Thomas challenges many of these points. He first offers a diagnosis of Hitler and concludes that the FÅhrer was suffering from the advanced stages of Parkinson's disease and showed signs of a personality disorder—probably schizophrenia. Of course, the diagnosis suffers from the fact that the physician is rendering judgment 50 years later, based on second-hand observations. But this section is the stronger part of the book. Thomas goes on to insist that the female body found in the bunker was not that of Eva Braun but a double. The ``corpse'' of Martin Borman, Hitler's personal secretary, was similarly misidentified, permitting Borman to escape to South America. The most startling and sensational claim is that Hitler did not commit suicide but was strangled by one of his servants. Thomas goes to great lengths to support his theory that an elaborate forensic fraud has been perpetrated, initially by Germans to preserve Hitler's heroic image and supported by British and Soviet intelligence. There are long passages on dental records and on how the body decomposes; yet for all its scientific objectivity, the account can offer no proof that Thomas's alternative scenario is the truth. ``Revisionist'' history without the proof; a story as entertaining, and as solid, as the supermarket tabloids. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14018-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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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