Grim and transfixing documentation of life in hell, providing an indispensable record for historians and making an...
An extraordinary collection of diaries, letters, and journals from the Warsaw ghetto.
Of the city’s 1.3 million inhabitants, nearly 30% were Jews, and they were a diverse group; as translator Boehm observes in his introduction, in a single family one generation might speak Yiddish or practice Hasidism, while another might speak Polish or German and practice no religion at all. When the Nazis arrived in Warsaw in 1939, the Jewish population, swelled by refugees from the countryside, was confined to an area about the size of New York’s Central Park. Most of the material assembled here by the late Polish historian Grynberg dates from 1939 to the destruction of the ghetto in June 1943; many of the testimonials were recovered from makeshift time capsules buried by the secret Oneg Shabbat documentary project, while others were delivered to the Jewish Historical Institute after the war. The documents are as diverse as the population, some pious, some cynical, some resigned, and they are altogether remarkable. One diarist, Stanislaw Sznapman, records that the first thing German soldiers did on arriving in Warsaw was to demand money and jewelry from Jewish residents; “anyone brave enough to visit the command post the next morning and file a complaint never again saw the light of day—having dared to impugn the honor of a German soldier.” He adds that the Germans set about driving a wedge between the Polish and Jewish populations by deploying “people with Semitic features” to litter “public places with small bottles and boxes filled with lice.” (Grynberg notes that this has not been confirmed.) Another, Samuel Puterman, writes of the SS commandant in charge of the ghetto: “His kindly handsome face never lost the hint of a sneer when he passed by an old man whose forehead had been split open by a whip.”
Grim and transfixing documentation of life in hell, providing an indispensable record for historians and making an invaluable addition to the English-language literature of the Holocaust.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-5833-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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