A nimble and knowledgeable but long-winded cabinet of curiosities.
A cheerful, dryly unserious survey and travelogue through the landscape and psyche of Germany.
British writer Winder (The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond, 2006) slips as giddily into discussing the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War as the awfulness of German cuisine, the pogroms that seized German towns in the wake of the Napoleonic wars as the family tree of the Hohenzollerns. The author works with a meandering, loose chronology, beginning with the fantasy of ancient Germania as “a land of forest and personal freedom” and ending after World War II, when the incomparable richness of German history and achievement was “replaced with messianic infantilism.” Winder explains that first visiting Strasbourg cathedral as a young teen awakened his awareness of “an aesthetic sense,” and that he has been fascinated by Germany as Britain’s “weird twin” ever since. As a Brit, he has been inculcated in the horrors of German militarism, which since World War I essentially shuttered all intellectual and cultural curiosity about its golden prewar years, once “an intolerably poignant place” depicted in Thomas Mann’s early novels, now a “sort of dead zone.” The author makes a dogged, gracious attempt to re-engage with what is remarkable about Germany, or at least interesting and moving, even in its grotesqueness—often in the manner of W.G. Sebald, whom Winder evidently reveres. In his travels, Winder has galloped across the countryside in search of the German echt and on the way stopped at every notable castle, cathedral, walled town and bulky monument from Aachen to Wittenberg. The author’s characterization of the Germans veers from insultingly clichéd to charmingly illuminative. In the final chapters, he offers an impressive discussion of the shattering effects of World War I, both on Germany and the world.
A nimble and knowledgeable but long-winded cabinet of curiosities.Pub Date: March 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-25400-1
Page Count: 460
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
