A masterful account of Europe’s cursed century. When the smoke cleared from the ruins of the Second World War, many observers assumed that Europe as it had been known for centuries had come to an end. From the physical destruction of cities to the moral catastrophe of fascism and Nazism, it seemed as though those on the Continent had committed a collective suicide. A new type of war—cold—hovered on the horizon, leading some to envision the planet’s complete and final destruction. But as British historian Mazower (Univ. of Sussex; Inside Hitler’s Greece, 1993) makes clear, things weren—t always like this. The century had begun with high hopes, dashed by the bloody conflict of the Great War. Moreover, Europe’s reconstruction and the relatively peaceful close of the Cold War give reason for hope. More insightfully, Mazower stresses that the very concept of “Europe” has metamorphosed with startling rapidity over the last hundred years. And this ability to change may well prove to be the continent’s saving grace, he avers. The book is organized around the major three-way ideological struggle of the century: that between liberal democracy, fascism, and communism. Both fascism and communism claimed not only to be on the side of history, but also to be offering an end to it. Liberal democracy, the most modest of ideologies, appears to have weathered the storm best. Yet Mazower refuses to offer such platitudes as that liberal democracy “won” the Cold War or that we—ve therefore arrived at history’s “end.” Instead, as he explains in an epilogue, the task of “making Europe” continues to this day. Well written, with an excellent grasp of sources in several languages, this is a landmark study for the general reader. (10 maps)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-43809-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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