As anti-Semitism surges once again, this page-turning history reminds us of the sanguinary consequences of unchecked hatred.
The compelling story of the pursuit of a man responsible for the murders of at least 30,000 Latvian Jews during World War II.
Talty, whose bestselling books include The Black Hand and A Captain’s Duty (which was made into the Oscar-winning Tom Hanks vehicle Captain Phillips), remains true to his technique, delivering thoroughly researched, engrossing nonfiction in a thrillerlike narrative style. The author has several stories to tell, including that of Latvian murderer Herbert Cukurs, who transformed from a heroic civil aviator to a brutal executioner; the Holocaust in Latvia in general; Zelma Shepshelovich, a young Jewish woman who managed to escape capture and deportation; a Mossad agent called Mio, who endeared himself to Cukurs before leading him to his death in a house in Uruguay; the battle against granting amnesty to Nazis some years after the war; and Nazi hunters Tuviah Friedman and Simon Wiesenthal. Talty weaves these stories throughout the text, creating a rich narrative fabric, and the tension increases substantially when Mio finds Cukurs, who is suspicious and cautious, in Brazil and convinces the murderer that he is looking to get involved in business deals with him. The intense climax of the action (the death of Cukurs) occurs more than 40 pages before the end of the text; the final pages deal with the immediate and later after-stories of the principal characters. The author reveals both the profound darkness of the time period and the slender rays of hope that occasionally split it. The Holocaust accounts—degradations, torture, murder, etc.—are difficult to read yet nonetheless important. “Cukurs was hardly unique; there were many men like him in Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and elsewhere,” writes Talty. “But in his local context, he was the leading monster.”
As anti-Semitism surges once again, this page-turning history reminds us of the sanguinary consequences of unchecked hatred.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-328-61308-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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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