Deftly mingling subjective and objective material, Demetz shines a bright literary light on an important piece of political...
An all-encompassing, if sometimes daunting account of life in Prague during the six-year Nazi occupation.
In his follow-up to Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (1997), Prague-born historian Demetz (The Air Show at Brescia, 1909, 2002, etc.) covers a vast amount of political and cultural material, veering between scholarly and autobiographical approaches. The academic analysis is at times intimidatingly dense, but readers who persevere will be rewarded with rich, balanced profiles of significant figures ranging from Konstantin von Neurath, the Nazi-installed leader of Bohemia and Moravia, to Franz Kafka’s beloved Milena Jesenská, an essayist who was active in the resistance movement. The half-Jewish Demetz, who lost several family members in concentration camps, also includes detailed descriptions of the impact on Jews’ daily lives of Nazi racial policies, which could be as petty as bans on the purchase of fruit and coffee. On the cultural front, Czech films, literature and music are viewed mainly through the prism of the era’s political climate; Demetz discusses at length, for example, the role jazz played in inspiring members of the resistance. These meaty scholarly sections would have been more effective if they had been tightened. The book really shines, however, in the haunting accounts of the author’s childhood and youth, including a 1944 stint in Prague’s Pankrác prison: “In the morning, when the guards banged on our door, the oldest of us had to shout ‘Alles gesund” [All are healthy],’ but that did not stop the guards from rushing in to dunk our heads in the toilet bowls or taking us out to the corridor to do special gymnastics.”
Deftly mingling subjective and objective material, Demetz shines a bright literary light on an important piece of political and cultural history.Pub Date: April 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-28126-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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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