A well-conceived study of a little-known corner of history.
Nazi Germany, tourist destination? Yes, by this account—and, by 1937, a destination of choice for a half-million Americans per year.
“You did not have to be pro-Nazi to marvel at the green countryside, the vineyard-flanked rivers or the orchards stretching as far as the eye could see.” So notes Boyd (The Excellent Doctor Blackwell: The Life of the First Woman Physician, 2013, etc.) of the vast, lucrative trade marketing Germany under the Third Reich to non-German visitors, a trade that had begun in earnest immediately after World War I ended. It helped to hold those views or at least believe, as did British aristocrat Violet Bonham Carter, that “the reparations policy insisted on by France…was morally unjust and politically mad.” Carter was traveling to a grimy, still-staggering Germany in 1923, and during that and the following decade, many Britons and Americans came to Germany to enjoy the bohemian liberties depicted by Christopher Isherwood in the stories that would underlie the stage play Cabaret. Some of those Britons took pains to avoid dreadful middle-class people, “however nice they are,” and to stay among “one’s own kind,” as another aristocrat wrote to the folks back home. Some of Boyd’s portraits involve men and women whose firsthand views of Germany would harden their opposition to Nazism—including, surprisingly, the poet and playwright Samuel Beckett, who endured “freezing weather, lack of money, rain and leaking shoes” to report on the place with much less enthusiasm than Graham Greene. Boyd also adds a dimension to a well-known tale by noting Hitler’s famed refusal to shake the hand of African-American athlete Jesse Owens—but adding that ordinary Germans in the Olympic crowd “took the great black athlete to their hearts, chanting ‘Oh-vens! Oh-vens’ whenever he appeared.” Even so, Boyd notes the still greater popular enthusiasm for the regime, concluding that returning visitors would have had no illusions, if honest with themselves, about the Nazis’ true colors.
A well-conceived study of a little-known corner of history.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-782-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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