Though erratically presented, this work of literary research should spur further study.
An examination of the seminal works of World War II, many of which opened eyes to truth by eyewitnesses.
Civilians suffered most during WWII, by the millions, as professional translator Carpenter notes in this somewhat scattershot comparative study, from the first occupied Baltic states under the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, to the Battle of Britain and the bombing of cities, through the horrific stories of POW and concentration camps across Europe and Asia. Indeed, the events of the war “went counter to all previous notions of strategy, self-interest and concepts of human behavior,” leaving victims in shock and disbelief and often unable to convince others what had actually happened. Carpenter moves through the war by picking works of poetry and prose, in a variety of languages, that best illustrate both the “magical thinking” of many writers early on—e.g., the English authors Anthony Powell and Elizabeth Bowen—and the absolute need to bear witness to brutality that nearly lacked the language to tell it—e.g., in Jankiel Wiernik’s A Year in Treblinka. The war’s themes of authoritarian deception and disguise provided the fodder for works by Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler and Varlam Shalamov (“Lend Lease”), to name a few, while other writers employed metaphors and tropes of flight, animals and angels as a way to express the horror. Underscoring all of these bracing accounts is the basic need to leave a trace of oneself behind as life became precarious and death loomed everywhere, as the anonymous author of The Far Side of the Moon described when the iron doors of a train were shut, dislodging tiny pieces of paper: “From the gratings fluttered down showers of white scraps, atoms of paper on which were written names and addresses, last messages begging not to be forgotten, broken sentences and prayers.”
Though erratically presented, this work of literary research should spur further study.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-63158-004-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yucca/Skyhorse
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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