One man’s valiant story unearths valuable wartime details.
A dying father’s wartime army box yields a wealth of lively detail about American intelligence work in POW and displaced persons camps within the ruins of Europe.
Walter Wolff, who went on to found the furnishings maker Bon Marché, was a Jewish immigrant whose family made it to New York City in 1941, just in advance of the Nazi invasion of their country, Belgium. After attending the Dwight School in New York and becoming fluent in several European languages, Wolff was drafted into the U.S. Army in May 1943; he was not yet a citizen. The author, Wolff’s artist daughter, knew little about her father’s wartime exploits until he gave her the letters he kept in a metal box shortly before he died and she was able to read the prodigious correspondence (often written in French or German) he kept with his mother and others while serving in the military. The author’s translations are mostly verbatim and full of energy and punctuation. Starting at Camp Ritchie, in Maryland, Wolff and other “refugee soldiers” with useful language skills entered the short-lived Army Specialized Training Program located at several colleges—e.g., Virginia Tech, Yale—and at Camp Grant, in Rockford, Illinois, where Wolff was successively posted. There, he learned interrogation techniques and other types of psychological warfare. Yet the war was winding down, and time to get back to Europe and witness Germany’s debacle was growing short. So Wolff finagled a job through the Pentagon, first translating documents belonging to Mussolini, then moving into various displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria and vetting German war criminals—the latter proved to be a deeply satisfying task for Wolff. Along with Wolff’s intimately chronicled accounts of the devastation from bombings and the homelessness of Jews and others, the accompanying photographs he took himself reveal stirring remnants of an apocalypse.
One man’s valiant story unearths valuable wartime details.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62872-377-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | MILITARY | JEWISH | 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 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
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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