A valuable, intimate narrative of war.
An English translation of a Polish journalist’s firsthand experiences covering the Spanish Civil War.
Green has translated Polish journalist S.L. Shneiderman’s 1938 book Krig in Shpanyen (War in Spain), adding an introduction that outlines the origins of the conflict between the forces of the Republican government and the Fascist insurrectionists led by Francisco Franco. Shneiderman arrived in Spain in 1936 to cover the conflict for the Yiddish press, cognizant of the interest of his Jewish readership in the outcome of the war and in the fate of the thousands of Jews who had come to Spain to join the fight. Attending both a tribunal and a bullfight in Barcelona, Shneiderman describes a city caught between vibrant normalcy and incessant violence. In Valencia, Shneiderman experiences the terror of imminent bombardment when sirens alert him to seek shelter in a crowded cellar. Throughout his travels, Shneiderman contrasts the beauty of the Spanish countryside with the horrors of war, crafting evocative descriptions of ordinary people transformed into soldiers: “Young people and armed men and women rushed past me, the women in khaki trousers paired with green linen blouses. Red-painted lips, perfectly groomed eyebrows, and over-the-shoulder short-barreled rifles completed the women’s ensembles.” Shneiderman highlights stories of Jewish men and women who left their native lands and former occupations to command troops and challenge Fascist pilots in aerial dogfights, and he movingly recounts the letters forwarded to him from Jewish families imploring him to discover the fates of relatives who came to Spain to fight. Throughout his narrative, Shneiderman presciently anticipates the looming threat of Hitler’s Germany and the stakes of the Spanish war for Jewish people throughout Europe. Although Shneiderman largely eschews expressing his own political opinions, his compassionate observations speak for him: “A teacher from Tortosa told me he sent his pregnant wife to Majorca in early July to rest. He hasn’t heard from her since the insurrection—he is now either a father or a widower. He doesn’t know which.” The result is a powerful record of courage, brutality, and suffering.
A valuable, intimate narrative of war.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9798989452453
Page Count: 139
Publisher: White Goat Press
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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