A sprawling book, but with few wasted words—a welcome resource for students of modern history, literature and cultural...
Germany, said historian Norbert Elias, “cannot move ahead until a convincing explanation for the rise of Hitler has been given.” British journalist and scholar Watson (Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, 2005, etc.) offers several in this sweeping survey of German culture.
The 20th century should have belonged to the German-speaking world. Every humanist scholar was indebted to thinkers such as Hegel and Kant, every reformer to Marx and Engels, every musician to Beethoven and Mozart, every scientist to Röntgen and Einstein. All that came undone with the rise of Nazism, one result of which was a thorough disavowal of that culture. By one account, writes the author, some 60,000 writers, scientists, intellectuals, artists and musicians “were sent either into exile or to the death camps by 1939.” The infamies of Nazism are well known—so much so, in fact, that they are all that most non-Germans know of the German world today, such that, according to a recent poll, “fully 60 percent of Britons could not name a living German.” The author endeavors to make up for this generalized ignorance with this hefty tome, which begins with the death of Bach in 1750 and extends to the present, “normal” Germany. Every page is packed with names, dates and numbers, sometimes in an embarrassment of riches. Within just a few representative pages, for instance, the reader encounters capsule lives of Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Lion Feuchtwanger and Erich Maria Remarque. Occasionally Watson’s logic seems a bit rushed, as when he suggests that without Karl Marx, 9/11 would never have happened. (Adam Smith would seem as likely a candidate.) Valuably, the author identifies several cultural seedbeds for the rise of Nazism, among them the widespread acceptance among all classes of late-19th-century society of Social Darwinism, competing strains of anti-Semitism, each more virulent than the next, and an overarching sense of pessimism and grief following World War I—attested to, among other sources, in the sorrowful poems of Rilke.
A sprawling book, but with few wasted words—a welcome resource for students of modern history, literature and cultural studies.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-076022-9
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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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