A well-executed, original reflection on how social evil tends to endure, puzzle and resist efforts at redemption.
A provocative exploration of one of the “Nazi ‘human skin atrocities’ ”—a lampshade supposedly made of human skin.
New York Magazine contributing editor Jacobson (Teenage Hipster in the Modern World: From the Birth of Punk to the Land of Bush: Thirty Years of Apocalyptic Journalism, 2005, etc.) sums up a certain aspect of the postwar American Jewish experience when he writes, “In the Queens schoolyard of the 1950s, decades before the museums and Schindler’s List, the lampshade was our holocaust, the Shoah we knew.” He notes that “facts pertaining to the so-called [atrocities] remain a topic of debate, yet there is testimony indicating that the practice was widespread.” This evidence centers upon activities at the Buchenwald concentration camp and notorious Nazi Ilse Koch. The so-called “Buchenwald lampshade” was documented during liberation in a Billy Wilder–directed documentary, The Death Mills (1945), but disappeared thereafter. The official position of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is that the lampshade is a myth. Jacobson recounts an icy conversation he had with a museum representative, when he contacted them regarding the titular object, which a top lab's DNA testing had confirmed was of human origin. He received the lampshade from a cultural obsessive and bar owner who had purchased it at a post-Katrina rummage sale from a desperate, colorful substance abuser notorious as the “cemetery bandit of New Orleans.” The author and these two eccentrics became haunted by their suspicions that the lampshade was a Holocaust artifact. By focusing on his improbable journeys with the lampshade, and his hope that it “might somehow stand as a however tortured symbol of commonality,” he takes a wry approach to a horrific topic. The book's basic flaw is that beyond the DNA evidence, Jacobson cannot pinpoint the lampshade's human source or a clear connection to Buchenwald. Still, he does a solid job synthesizing the diverse locales and perspectives, which include thoughtful veterans, camp survivors, scholar obsessives, European neo-Nazis and even David Duke.
A well-executed, original reflection on how social evil tends to endure, puzzle and resist efforts at redemption.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6627-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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