Tedious account of riveting events surrounding Count Folke Bernadotte's release of prisoners from German concentration camps and his subsequent assassination, by Schwarz (co-author, The Peter Lawford Story, 1988, etc.). This is a story of unlikely allies—the idealistic Boy Scout leader Count Folke Bernadotte and the sinister SS leader Heinrich Himmler—who join in an even more unlikely enterprise: the freeing of Jews from concentration camps during the final months of WW II. The problem here is that Schwarz isn't very good on people: he utterly destroys Bernadotte (even for his own uses) by failing to plant any seeds of greatness, or even growth: ``Bernadotte's even being a gofer seemed to tax Bernadotte's abilities''; he was ``a self-centered playboy''; his sister ``knew her brother was immature, a spoiled rich boy with limited intelligence.'' Bernadotte, says Schwarz, ``seemed to envision the SS a little like summer sleep-away camp counsellors gathering the children together for parents' day.'' But somehow this incompetent cut a deal with the Nazis, and Schwarz gives no clear sense of how the miracle occurred. Jumping hither and thither in a kind of quasi-epic style, Schwarz obscures his story with a good deal of retold, peripheral material on the Goebbels family, and on events like the assassination of Heydrich and the subsequent razing of Lidice. Nor is Bernadotte's ``maturing process'' very clear; it's been rendered virtually impossible by the early description. The fascinating Yitzhak Shamir, dominant presence in the Stern Gang (generally assumed to have assassinated Bernadotte), never really comes into focus either, but his motives do: Bernadotte, proceeding on the Wilsonian notion of self-determination, proposed an Arab state that would allow Jews ``special rights.'' Like Wilson, he irritated everyone, especially the Stern Gang. A huge drama full of players on the grand scale, none of whom comes alive within the confines of this treatment.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55778-315-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
