Why did the most savagely anti-Semitic regime in history gain power in Germany rather than, say, France (scene of the Dreyfus affair) or Russia (with its widespread pogroms)? Weiss (History/Lehman College and Graduate Center, CUNY; The Fascist Tradition, not reviewed, etc.) doesn't quite satisfactorily answer this question, but he does come close. In the process, he has produced a detailed, clearly written account of German anti-Semitism from Luther to Hitler, nicely integrating political, social, and intellectual history. He demonstrates how the demonization of the Jews came to pervade almost every segment of a German society otherwise characterized by oligarchy and torn by class conflict; Jews, he documents, became the scapegoats for popular resentment at the excesses of capitalism, communism, and modernism. In fact, even such leaders of the anti-Nazi opposition as Leipzig mayor Karl Goederler believed that ``the Jewish people belongs to a different race.'' Weiss also hypothesizes that what made genocidal thinking take root in Germany was the popularity of eugenics and other aspects of ``racial hygiene'' among physicians, anthropologists, and political leaders. Unfortunately, after making some interesting comparisons between French and German attitudes toward democratic government, he largely abandons the comparative approach that would be essential to answering the question implied in the book's subtitle. The most serious flaw is Weiss's periodic tendency to be overly deterministic, assuming that after 1933 ``the iron logic that led to the Holocaust was set in motion.'' Finally, Weiss appears to have engaged in very little firsthand research, although he has done a fine job of synthesizing insights from secondary sources. Neither very original nor entirely convincing in its thesis that a Nazi-like regime could only have gained power in Germany, this is still an extremely stimulating and informative work.
Pub Date: Jan. 5, 1996
ISBN: 1-56663-088-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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 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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