Sure to fuel the continuing controversy over the response of German citizens to National Socialism. Fest is one of the preeminent scholars of the Nazi period whose previous books (Hitler, 1974; The Face of the Third Reich, 1970) are considered standard works in the field. Consequently, his latest work must be accorded serious attention, even (or especially) if it contradicts current interpretations. While scholars such as Daniel Goldhagen (Hitler's Willing Executioners) and John Weiss (Ideology of Death) argue that most Germans actively supported the Nazi regime and acquiesced in its exterminationist programs, Fest argues that we should not overlook an active, diverse resistance movement. In fact, he documents more than a dozen plots to assassinate Hitler. In part because of the devastating Nazi repression of the left, it was, ironically, from conservative and military circles that opposition to Hitler emerged. Aristocratic circles in business, agriculture, the church, and the army viewed Hitler's rise with some trepidation. They had prospered under earlier regimes, and while they shared some of Hitler's beliefs, such as anti-Semitism and an aversion to modernism, they deeply mistrusted his modern, mass politics. Soon after Hitler's arrival in office, the major figures of the Communist, Socialist, and religious opposition disappeared into prisons, concentration camps, or exile, leaving the conservative groups to plot an assassination. And as the war took a fatal turn, military figures stepped up their efforts to kill Hitler. The cynical might argue that with defeat in sight, the dissidents were merely trying to ensure their own survival. In fact, the scope of the resistance seems very narrow, never becoming a civil movement as in France or Italy, with evidence of a subject people seeking moral and political redemption. A story of pathos and defeat rather than heroism and triumph, it may unwittingly reinforce our view of the aggregate unwillingness or inability of Germans to resist Hitler's vision.
Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-4213-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
HISTORY | MODERN | 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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