An important and horrifying contribution to Holocaust studies.
The tale of one Eastern European town reflects a long history of anti-Semitism and political strife.
Bartov (European History/Brown Univ.; Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, 2007, etc.) draws on historical and archival sources to create a stark portrait of a town in present-day Ukraine, where enmity between Polish and Ukrainian residents, compounded by Russian, Austrian, and German incursions, resulted in violent reactions against the Jewish population. This contribution to Holocaust and genocide studies, in which the author is a respected scholar, is notable for the barbarism that erupted among ordinary men and women against their Jewish neighbors during World War II. Anti-Semitism, however, was rampant much earlier: in a 1924 memoir, a witness reported seeing a Jewish orphanage set on fire by soldiers in search of vodka; in a synagogue courtyard, he “was stunned by a terrifying picture of destruction, vandalism, and cruelty.” Houses were filled with raped Jewish women and “men with smashed heads and gouged eyes.” Jews became the focus of hatred by Poles who believed that they preferred Austrian rule to Polish independence. Jews, Bartov writes, “were featured as an alien, inassimilable, and potentially subversive element,” lumped together with despised Russians and communists. The most hated enemies were Ukrainians, characterized as savage hordes. Ukrainians, for their part, publicized their plight as victims, aligning themselves with Jews. During the war, ethnic hatred erupted into mass murder. Germans created local groups to suppress organized resistance, transforming the Ukrainian militia into “a uniformed district police force.” Bartov profusely documents sadistic atrocities that occurred at the hands of soldiers, police, and security forces throughout the war. What he finds most shocking—and readers will agree—is the “astonishing ease” with which “spouses and children, lovers and colleagues, friends and parents, appear to have enjoyed their brief murderous sojourn in the region” as they killed people they knew personally. “For many of them,” he writes, “this was clearly the best time of their lives.”
An important and horrifying contribution to Holocaust studies.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8453-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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