A footnote to history, to be sure, but a fascinating one.
Were the Dutch a nation of heroes of World War II resistance, as they like to claim? Paris-based Financial Times columnist Kuper (The Football Men: Up Close with the Giants of the Modern Game, 2011, etc.) rains on the liberation parade by suggesting that the right answer is, not quite.
Soccer, a British wag once remarked, is way more important than life or death. By this account, it sometimes trumps even war. When the Nazis were rising in power in Germany in the 1930s, they used competitive games—and particularly soccer—as a vehicle of diplomacy; they were good sports when they lost, and they cheered good performances on the pitch no matter who gave them. Even when the Nazis declared war on half the world and overran most of Europe, soccer occupied a kind of hallowed ground. “The point of the game was distraction,” writes Kuper, “not propaganda; soccer was a space where Germans could escape from the war, where life continued as it always had.” That did not keep the Germans from insisting that soccer teams in occupied countries be cleared of Jewish players, managers, owners and others. Kuper asserts that too many Dutch teams did so too willingly. Ajax, a team beloved of Israelis today, was no exception. Some Jewish players wound up in Auschwitz and other death camps; some non-Jewish players resisted, while others collaborated. Though Kuper’s book promises to explore the history of Ajax and other soccer clubs, it goes much deeper, dissecting the widely held view that the Dutch were guid and the Germans fout during those ugly years. “The Israelis are right in a way; the Dutch were good in the war,” Kuper writes. “Not the Second World War, though, but the war of 1973.” If you want a nation that really resisted the Nazis, he adds, look at Denmark. Kuper’s narrative is a little loopy, and he kicks topics around the way Maradona smacks a ball, sometimes with a great roundabout curve to it—but always hitting the goal.
A footnote to history, to be sure, but a fascinating one.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-56858-723-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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 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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