A brilliant synthesis: lucid and felicitous, scholarly and compassionate.
A rich, comprehensive analysis of the rise and fall of Hitler's Germany, by historian Burleigh (Death and Deliverance, 1994).
The author wishes to resist "an indiscriminate condemnation of the German people in general," but he presents a devastating examination of the "almost total moral collapse" that accompanied (and permitted) the unthinkable atrocities of Adolf Hitler. Beginning with an assessment of the devastating effects of WWI on the German economy (and psyche), Burleigh moves swiftly to a biographical sketch of Hitler—with special attention to his notion of "racial fitness and purity, which was not without religious undertones." Slowly—but with insidious momentum—the Nazis' racist ethos pervaded German society, then spread throughout Europe as one country after another capitulated to the German military. Although the author writes with the disinterest of the professional historian, he also delivers appropriately harsh and often eloquent judgments of the principals involved. "Rarely," he quips about Hitler and his immediate circle, "can such an unprepossessing group of people have had so much to say about fitness and purity." Because this is a general history, Burleigh's strokes are often broad. The Normandy invasion, for example, consumes only a couple of pages. Nonetheless, he manages to include many specific incidents and details, some that freeze the blood: a brutally frank speech by Himmler (he refers to Jews as bacteria), a sympathetic view of the German civilians who endured the rather indiscriminate Allied bombing (hundreds of thousands died), and an inspiring account of the of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (hanged for his opposition to the Nazi mass murderers). Burleigh comments, too, on the irony of the alliance of the world's great democracies with the Soviet Union, "a totalitarian dictatorship of unfathomable barbarity."
A brilliant synthesis: lucid and felicitous, scholarly and compassionate.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8090-9325-1
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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