Turner (History/Yale; ed., Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, 1985, etc.) presents a compelling day-by-day account of the final month of unlikely parliamentary maneuvers that led to Adolf Hitler's appointment as Germany's chancellor in January 1933. By the autumn of 1932, Hitler's Nazi movement seemed in decline. Riven by internal disputes and hurt by competing right- wing movements, the Nazis had polled poorly in the November 1932 Reichstag elections. Also, although the Nazis retained a powerful presence in the chamber because of a July 1932 electoral triumph, their parliamentary clout was diminished by the Reichstag's impotence: The chamber was hamstrung by large factions of right- and left-wing extremists, and Germany's president, Paul von Hindenburg, and the cabinets appointed by him ruled largely by fiat. Hitler's key to power lay in the hands of Hindenburg and in the two former army officers who held the chancellorship immediately before Hitler, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher. Turner makes clear that without Hindenburg's obtuseness, Schleicher's ineptitude, and Papen's overweening ambition, Hitler would not have been appointed chancellor. Schleicher, formerly a friend of Papen's, made it possible for him to become chancellor. Papen, tremendously unpopular as chancellor, exploited his close relationship with Hindenburg to have Hitler appointed because he felt he could control the Nazis. Based on Hitler's false assurances, Papen overcame Hindenburg's revulsion to Hitler. After his appointment, Hitler immediately took steps to consolidate his own power and achieve access to the president's emergency powers, which he used to destroy the Weimar Republic and create his dictatorship. In assessing responsibility for Hitler's rise, Turner makes the interesting argument that a military dictatorship by the likes of Schleicher or Papen, although abhorrent, would have been preferable to the establishment of Hitler as dictator. Turner gives a chilling account of how the failure of democratic processes can give rise to dictatorship. (b&w photos)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-201-40714-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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 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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