19 pp. color photos, 4 maps) (Supplement to BBC2's television series "War of the Century")
A powerful collection of firsthand narratives that provides human points of access to WWII’s horrific eastern front.
Rees (The Nazis: A Warning from History, not reviewed) is the anchor and senior producer of BBC Television’s history programs. Here, he again demonstrates his ability to link the broad and impersonal sweep of history with poignant human experiences. Beginning with Hitler’s deliberate betrayal of Stalin and the euphoria of early German successes accompanying it, Rees marches through the history of the eastern war. The text lingers over the pathos of the treatment of civilians by both dictatorships, paints a bloody picture of the barbarous battle around Stalingrad, and concludes with the iron-willed ascension of the Soviets over Eastern Europe in the wake of Hitler’s collapse. Taking advantage of new access to the ex-Soviet veterans and survivors of the war’s violence, Rees breaks new ground by documenting the stories of 56 eyewitnesses from both the German and Soviet sides of the conflict. From the cold-blooded rationalization inherent in the personal testimonies of both German SS troops and members of the equally feared Soviet SMERSH to the heartbreaking accounts of enforced starvation and systematic genocide in the fields of Russia and the notorious German camps, Rees lends human faces and voices to an era of modern history not easily understood. The accumulated power of the individual tales transforms what would otherwise be an elementary and general history into an important historical text deserving of wide readership. The compelling blend of sound military and social history with personal stories of the war’s combatants and victims creates a unique and dramatic document about totalitarianism and its devastating effects in the 20th century. (b&w photos throughout,
19 pp. color photos, 4 maps) (Supplement to BBC2's television series "War of the Century")Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56584-599-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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