Of profound importance to history—and certain to stir up nests of hornets.
Turkish historian Akçam capably refutes those who deny the Armenian genocide, who will probably not change their minds.
No one knows how many Armenians died at Turkish hands in the 1910s, but the number almost certainly exceeds one million. Akçam, writing from the safe distance of the University of Minnesota, has worked through thousands and thousands of documents to find concrete evidence thereof, against considerable difficulty. For one thing, in the post–World War I era, the so-called Young Turks who had led the genocide were still in power and ordered the destruction of countless incriminating documents. For another, no less comprehensive, that postwar government promulgated an alphabet reform that replaced Arabic script with Latin letters, so that, apart from a few scholars, Turkey is now “a society that cannot read its own newspapers, letters and diaries if they were written before 1928. . . . As a result, modern Turkey is totally dependent on history as the state has defined and written it.” More puzzling is the complicity of the victorious Allies in allowing Turkey to escape punishment for—and then deny—its actions against the Armenians; Akçam turns up documents there, too. He is unsparing in his evidence, including proof that Turkish officials who refused to obey murderous orders were themselves murdered. Yet the author also ventures explanations for how the genocide could have been so easily conducted: Most Turks, it appears, condoned it, believing that with the rapid collapse of the Ottoman Empire, their nation was in danger of being carved up by Armenian nationalists. Ironically, hoping for a homeland of their own, Muslim Kurds joined in the slaughter of Christian Armenians, who had “been willing to convert to escape death.” Convicts released from prison for the purpose butchered tens of thousands, too. Yet the Turkish government bears the greatest responsibility for the murders, even if it will not admit to it.
Of profound importance to history—and certain to stir up nests of hornets.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7932-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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
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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