A book both insightful and painful to read.
An account of Britain and France’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
A Cambridge graduate and Czech scholar, Caquet (The Orient, the Liberal Movement, and the Eastern Crisis of 1839-41, 2016)—who speaks Czech, Slovak, French, and German—writes that Czechoslovakia, formed after the 1918 breakup of Austria-Hungary, was a vibrant, prosperous democracy. It contained several non-Czech ethnic groups, including German-speakers (Sudetens), about 20 percent of the population. Though never part of Germany proper, Sudetens participated in the government and were not persecuted. When Hitler came to power, he proclaimed that all Germans yearned to join the Reich. With Nazi backing, a Sudeten quasi-Nazi party formed, and its violent tactics soon made it the dominant political force. With Nazi media full of purely fictional accounts of atrocities against Sudetens and Hitler demanding self-determination, Britain and France realized that there was a “Sudeten problem” and offered to negotiate a solution. No one at the time knew that Hitler had ordered Sudeten leaders to make impossible demands. In September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew for his first meeting with Hitler, coming away full of praise for his statesmanship. Returning after dragooning the reluctant French and even more reluctant Czechs to agree to cede lands with more than 50 percent German-speakers, he was flabbergasted when Hitler refused. War seemed imminent, which, Caquet emphasizes, might have been a good thing. The Czechs had a fortified frontier and a formidable army, Germany’s generals believed the Wermacht was not prepared, and the Soviet Union declared its support for the Czechs (it became a German ally a year later). Sadly, Chamberlain was indefatigable, warning French leaders that Britain would not support them in any war. Eagerly accepting Mussolini’s offer to help, he returned a few days later and gave Hitler everything he wanted. With access to new material, the author delivers what is likely the definitive history of a disgraceful event.
A book both insightful and painful to read.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-050-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 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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