A well-written survey of a turning point in modern history.
Prolific WWII historian and Churchill biographer Gilbert (Churchill and America, 2005, etc.) analyzes the first coordinated, nationwide attack on Germany’s Jews.
Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass,” took place on Nov. 10, 1938. Within 24 hours, thousands of Jewish homes, shops and houses of worship were ransacked and burned; a quarter of the Jewish men remaining in the Third Reich were arrested; and hundreds of Jews of all ages were beaten and killed. The campaign was largely conducted by Hitler’s Storm Division, the Brownshirts, who staged attacks everywhere more than a few Jews lived, from small farms to the center of Berlin. Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich and presumably Hitler drew great satisfaction from the spasm of violence, happily noting that even little German boys were joining in to beat and burn. Gilbert’s account is rather general on where the orders from on high originated, but it is searing and specific in relating the violence as it unfolded, documenting myriad brutalities, but also the small acts of resistance mounted by ordinary Germans—from concierges to military officers—in order to protect their neighbors. He exposes a few ironies: the Gestapo’s acquiescence in allowing what would become Israel’s Mossad to operate in Berlin to recruit Jews to emigrate to Palestine; the utter destruction of a kosher restaurant in Vienna that had just been sold to a Nazi Party member. Where Western governments did almost nothing in response, Indian and Chinese officials offered asylum. Yet ordinary citizens around the world finally saw the Nazi regime for what it was, for no other event in the war against the Jews was so thoroughly covered by the international press as it was happening. “Kristallnacht,” Gilbert concludes, “taught the Nazi administrators and planners that they must in future act with silence and secrecy, hiding what they were doing to the Jews from the eyes of world indignation.”
A well-written survey of a turning point in modern history.Pub Date: June 13, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-057083-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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