A timely, urgent call to revisit the past with an eye to correction and remedy.
A pointed demonstration of how Germany offers lessons for attending to polarizing issues of the past and present.
“It cannot be too much to expect the U.S. Congress to do in the twenty-first century what the German parliament did in 1952,” writes Einstein Forum director Neiman (Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age, 2015, etc.), in favor of legislation that would create a commission to investigate the possibility of reparations for the pains suffered by African Americans under slavery and by other populations, such as Native Americans in the way of so-called Manifest Destiny. In recognizing the necessity of making real amends for the crimes of the Third Reich, Germany has paid just such reparations in many ways—even though, as the author notes, most Germans opposed such payments in the years immediately following World War II, just as it seems that most white Americans oppose reparations today. The issues extend: Germany bans expressions in support of Nazism even though extreme right-wingers have been recently emboldened by the widespread controversy over immigration, another topic familiar to Americans today. Even with such outbursts, Germany holds a lead over the U.S. in dealing with errors of the past. Where the wartime generation tried to brush aside the legacy of Nazism, the present one exemplifies “how far Germany has come in taking responsibility for its criminal history.” While direct equations between, say, the American secessionists and the Nazis are problematic, there are plenty of points in common. Interestingly, it took the unification of Germany to arrive at full acknowledgment of past wrongs: The East took one view, the West another, each accusing the other of complicity. Today, Neiman writes, quoting a German scholar, “Germany is one of the safest countries for Jews in the world." Neiman’s account is long and at times plodding, but her examination of how that situation came about serves as an important lesson for those who seek to face up to the past wrongs in this country.
A timely, urgent call to revisit the past with an eye to correction and remedy.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-18446-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
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
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