A superb account of the growth and day-to-day functioning of the Nazi state.
Attaining power is one thing, as the first volume—The Coming of the Third Reich (2004)—in Cambridge historian Evans’s trilogy on Nazi Germany demonstrated. The challenge is keeping it.
If a European of 1910 had had to guess where a violent irruption of anti-Semitism would occur within a few decades, the answer likely would have been France. Germany achieved the distinction when the avowedly racist Nazi Party took its place at the head of government and promulgated laws “against class struggle and materialism, for the national community and an idealistic outlook.” After the Night of the Long Knives, the Nazis were effectively unopposed; yet, by Evans’s account, much of their effort was thereafter directed toward convincing the German people to buy into the antireligious, totalitarian tenets of the police state. As late as 1939, many German teachers paid only lip service to Nazism; one student recalls, “It was very difficult for me to accept any teaching at all, because I never knew how much the teacher believed in it or not.” The Nazi leadership had to contend not only with resistance on the part of adults, but also with an exuberant Hitler Youth as wild and uncontrollable as the Red Guards would prove to be in China. Eventually, the Nazis secured near-total power, yet what really won hearts and minds was the party’s fulfillment of “the basic desire of the vast majority for order, security, jobs, the possibility of improved living standards and advancement”—all the things that the Weimar government had not been able to deliver. That vast majority seemed largely unmoved that Jews, gays, the political opposition and other undesirables were disappearing, or that the government quickly forgot its promises to save the middle class and small businesses and instead took the interests of the major corporations as its own.
A superb account of the growth and day-to-day functioning of the Nazi state.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2005
ISBN: 1-59420-074-2
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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