A lucid survey synthesizing a broad range of historical research.
A timely study of the world’s first great scientific-military-industrial complex.
Ideally, observes Cornwell (History/Cambridge Univ.; Hitler’s Pope, 2001, etc.), science is about the free exchange of ideas and information for the social good. Such qualities marked German science throughout the Enlightenment and into the 20th century. But even before the rise of the Nazi regime, German scientists were busy developing theories to prove the supposed superiority of their people—and, of course, perfecting plenty of death-dealing technologies. When Hitler came to power and pressed science and industry into the service of the state, many of those scientists, “notably doctors and anthropologists,” obliged—promulgating, among other things, a nationwide anti-smoking campaign in the bargain. Many other scientists fled, including some of the nation’s best physicists and chemists. To counter the brain drain, Cornwell writes, the renowned scientist Max Planck called on Hitler to plead “that certain Jewish scientists were worth nurturing for the benefit of the state”—which Hitler rejected, saying, “A Jew is a Jew.” Germany’s loss was the Allies’ gain in such critical areas as cryptography and, of course, the development of nuclear weaponry, which, Cornwell observes, Hitler was not much interested in anyway, in keeping with what Albert Speer remarked was his “antimodern” stance “in decisions on armaments.” Anti-modern in most other aspects of science, Hitler nonetheless kept legions of scientists busy, forging strong links among the Reich’s death and labor camps and Germany’s universities, research facilities, and hospitals. Cornwell’s account is mainly straightforward, and he rightly points out how pseudo-science came to dominate pure science as the Third Reich evolved. Ever the controversialist, he closes with a rhetorical likening of modern politicized and militarized science to that practiced under Hitler’s regime—save that, he writes, scientists in those days could emigrate, whereas today “in the globalized domains of science and technology there are no oases of irresponsible purity into which a scientist can retreat.”
A lucid survey synthesizing a broad range of historical research.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03075-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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
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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