An evocative, thoughtful, and otherwise impressive combination of memoir, oral history, and reflection on the nature of memory by a child of Viennese Jews who immigrated in 1939 to the exotic, landlocked South American country. Spitzer (History/Dartmouth) was born in La Paz in the year his parents arrived, making him in a sense both a participant in and an observer of the central European Jewish refugee experience. In preparation for this book, he engaged in 150 hours of interviews with Austrian and German immigrants to Bolivia. His work is in large part a collective history, enlivened with a series of portraits of individual refugees. Spitzer is particularly interesting on the encounters marked by mutual fascination, estrangement, and stereotyping between previously upper-middle-class central European Jews and Bolivia’s chacos (urban, sometimes illiterate mestizos). Beyond this, he engages in a series of reflections on “the contextualization of memory and the interdependence—and tension—between memory and history.” For example, after looking at his own wartime family photographs and listening to immigrants’ recollections of life in Bolivia, he observes that “groups recall, recognize, and distort their present memory to represent the past,” quoting Joan W. Smith’s observation that one historian’s or layperson’s rendering of a group’s “collective” experience “is at once already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted.” Spitzer’s prose occasionally bogs down, particularly in a far too detailed chapter on “Buena Tierra,” an ultimately failed attempt to establish a refugee rural collective. Nonetheless, his work does serve to vividly introduce readers to a little-known aspect of refugee history during the Holocaust, while impelling them to think deeply about the nature of personal adaptation, and of individual and group efforts to capture, preserve, and transmit a knowledge of what they have endured. (60 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8090-5545-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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
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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