A scholar's illuminating rundown, complete with telling anecdotal detail, on a great war's largely forgotten men.
An affecting wide-angle overview of the POW experience during World War II.
Drawing on interviews with more than 150 U.S. and German soldiers who were interned, Carlson (History/Western Michigan Univ.) offers a judiciously organized survey that lets a host of exprisoners of war speak for themselves. He first addresses the severe mental shock sustained by combatants who were taken captive on the battlefield or (in the case of downed airmen and D-day paratroopers) behind the lines. The author next focuses on the physical hardships, short rations, and other privations endured by Americans confined in the Third Reich's typically primitive camps; by contrast, their German counterparts who sat out the fighting in Stateside lockups had a far easier time of it. In some instances, moreover, American POWs identified as Jewish, or incorrigible, or suspected of being spies were sent to concentration camps; over 50 years later, their matter-of-fact recollections of the ghastly events they experienced bear eloquent witness to humankind's infinite capacity for inhumanity. Carlson goes on to debunk the Hollywood myth that escape was a preoccupation of either Allied or German POWs; precious few ever made it beyond the wire, or even tried. Covered as well is the grisly fate of informers as well as undercover agents who tried and failed to infiltrate inmate populations on either side of the Atlantic and, the Geneva Convention notwithstanding, the dilatory pace of repatriation from the US. While almost all American interns were freed by their own or Soviet troops before VE Day, fewer than 75,000 of the 380,000-odd Germans held in the US were sent home in 1945; in addition, many of those who made it back to Europe in 1946 spent another three years as POWs in England or France.
A scholar's illuminating rundown, complete with telling anecdotal detail, on a great war's largely forgotten men.Pub Date: April 30, 1997
ISBN: 0-465-09120-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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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