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A HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

VOL. II: 1933-1951

If the first volume of Gilbert’s History of the Twentieth Century (1997) seemed tired, the second, covering the years up to and following the Second World War, reveal again his high quality as a narrative historian. Gilbert, Churchill’s official biographer, continues to deal with the period chronologically, year by year, but the era itself has a grim coherence. The war, he writes, “saw the greatest loss of military and civilian life in so short a time in recorded history,” but as he notes, the years 1939 to 1945 are “in many ways arbitrary” as a division. Before WWII’s outbreak, civil war had raged in China and Spain, the prolonged and cruel Japanese invasion of China was in full swing, Stalin had waged a pitiless war against his own people and purged his party, and Hitler had overthrown Austria and Czechoslovakia, and begun the annihilation of the Jews. During the war itself more than three million Soviet soldiers were murdered in German concentration camps. Of more than half a million Jews in Warsaw, only 200 survived to witness its liberation. The end of the war, while it brought relief to millions and punishment to some of the guilty, left most of Eastern Europe under the control of the Soviet Union, saw China fall under an equally ruthless despotism, marked the beginning of the colonial war in Indochina, and led to the Korean War. This is classic political history, with only cursory attention paid to economic and social developments and almost none to Africa or Latin America. Gilbert does not really try—perhaps no one could—to account for this long night of the human spirit. But his skill in leavening grand strategy with individual experience and in illuminating the pathos of these events makes this a memorable achievement.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-688-10065-1

Page Count: 932

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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