Even if those whom it is meant to sway will likely reject it out of hand, students of the Nazi era will find Longerich’s...
Breaking news, at least of a kind: Adolf Hitler played a central role in the Holocaust.
There seems little surprising in that thesis, which is apparently self-evident. But it is not: because Hitler took great care not to issue instructions or to specify procedures in writing, documentary evidence linking Hitler to mass murder is scarce; thus Holocaust deniers have argued that the enormity was the doing of misguided lieutenants, and not of the Führer. British historian Longerich drafted this work as expert testimony for the defense in the 1997 libel suit brought by one such apologist, David Irving, against Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust. His argument provides beyond-reasonable-doubt evidence that Hitler’s political career was bracketed, from start to finish, by deep-seated bloodlust against the Jews, “a murderous intention that was expressed over and over again, internally and in public speeches, by the leader of the Nazi Party, the head of state and commander of the armed forces,” and that Hitler saw to it that his intentions were made real. Though many hands were required to effect the Nazi program of genocide, and though German anti-Semitism had deep roots, Hitler took the guiding role in shaping every phase of the regime’s anti-Jewish policies and actions, rejecting programs that originated with others within the Reich, such as Heinrich Himmler’s proposal to resettle European Jews in Madagascar, prefaced with modest words of dissent to the effect that Himmler had dismissed “Bolshevist methods for the physical extirpation of a people as un-German and impossible.” Hitler had no such scruples, Longerich demonstrates, and though direct orders have yet to be found, the fact that “Hitler had expressed himself in the most drastic manner imaginable about the ‘solution’ to the Jewish question” means that Nazi responsibility for the crime cannot be separated from the will of the Nazis’ supreme leader.
Even if those whom it is meant to sway will likely reject it out of hand, students of the Nazi era will find Longerich’s work of much value.Pub Date: June 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-7524-2564-1
Page Count: 255
Publisher: Tempus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | 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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