The workmanlike telling of Ogorzow's pursuit and eventual capture lacks a certain impact, though fans of serial-killer...
Straightforward account of the historical curiosity of a sadistic serial killer preying on women in the heart of Nazi Germany.
Selby (The Axmann Conspiracy: The Nazi Plan for a Fourth Reich and How the U.S. Army Defeated It, 2012, etc.) notes that for Paul Ogorzow, an average-seeming railroad worker, “night had acquired new meaning in wartime Berlin”; with it, the entire city was his hunting ground. The historical record suggests Ogorzow was a fiend akin to Ted Bundy, a seemingly well-adjusted man (Ogorzow was married with children) secretly compelled to murder eight random women and assault others: "Giving up his attacks was not a consideration…[so] he focused on what he could do to become a better criminal." After some close calls, Ogorzow realized he could freely pursue women traveling on the blacked-out "S-Bahn" commuter line. Selby shifts perspectives between Ogorzow’s grisly misdeeds—which culminated in his flinging his still-living victims from the speeding train—and the “Kripo” (criminal police) detectives, determined to catch him yet kept in check by Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, who “wanted to project an image of Nazi Germany…as a place free from such problems as the predations of a serial killer.” Old-fashioned detective work eventually snared the killer; neither Ogorzow’s belated attempts to blame “a Jewish doctor” for mistreating his gonorrhea nor his request for leniency as a Nazi “Brownshirt” delayed his appointment with the guillotine. Selby creates verisimilitude by focusing on numerous details of daily life in the Third Reich, demonstrating how everything from rail travel to law enforcement was bent to the will of Hitler's henchmen. Yet, he rarely exploits the obvious historical irony of Ogorzow's small-scale evil against the grander backdrop of Berliners' complicity in conquest and genocide, only noting that some of his pursuers went on to participate in war crimes.
The workmanlike telling of Ogorzow's pursuit and eventual capture lacks a certain impact, though fans of serial-killer narratives will surely be engaged.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-425-26414-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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
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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