Discouraging yet important, expertly rendered political history.
Historical analysis of the interwar period and “the legacy of anti-globalism,” a history that holds relevance for today.
MacArthur fellow Zahra, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, begins by quoting 1920s pundits who mourned the golden age before 1914 when internationalism flourished and one traveled the world after simply buying a ticket. This may have been true for the (largely White) affluent class, but deep poverty and inequality affected the majority. The devastation of World War I produced worldwide demands for justice. Unfortunately, true justice was hard to come by, and readers will often squirm at Zahra’s excellent yet unnerving history of an era when nationalism—always more powerful than ideology, economics, or brotherly love—exploded. Those who assume that mass murder began with Hitler will learn their error as Zahra recounts how the torrent of new European states created after the Treaty of Versailles proclaimed the superiority of the ruling ethnic group and expelled “foreigners.” By 1926, this situation had created 9.5 million of “a new kind of migrant: the refugee.” Though many historians don’t portray Hitler and Mussolini as anti-globalists, they justified their wars as a means of acquiring resources from a world that they thought was depriving their citizens. Autarky, or national self-sufficiency, became a worldwide passion. Passports appeared; tariffs soared; and governments promoted cottage industries to replace foreign imports and a return to the land to allow the unemployed to feed themselves and the nation. Zahra points out that these sentiments slowed during World War II and the Cold War. Globalism became a buzzword in the 1990s, when “a certain kind of free-market capitalism and global integration appeared to be the unstoppable victors of history” after the collapse of communism. McDonald’s had opened in Moscow, and the new World Wide Web was uniting the world. Then came the 21st century, when the bottom seemed to fall out, and supernationalists proclaimed that they had been right all along.
Discouraging yet important, expertly rendered political history.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-393-65196-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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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