A thoughtful and brave study of how the Holocaust has become an overly central myth and too commercialized for its own effectiveness. Cole is a fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and is well positioned to know that there is no business like Shoah (Holocaust) business. The book grew from lectures at the University of Bristol in England, whence its youthful brazenness to criticize the sacrosanct. Holocaustism as an industry is shown to dwarf the budget of other, especially educational needs in the American Jewish community. The three people whom the first chapters are named for reflect Cole’s vision of Holocaust history. First is Anne Frank, the most famous child and victim in our century. In 1947, long before her book, Broadway show, and Amsterdam attic became global sensations, the diary’s modest popularity reflected the Jewish and gentile mood that the unspeakable tragedy was best not spoken about. Even in Israel, where the Holocaust became a flag of victimhood and cause for national survival, the yet unnamed calamity was associated with the powerless Diaspora past and neglected—until the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann (Cole’s second chapter). Not mere revenge, this “trial was about reawakening a concern with the Holocaust both inside and outside the country.” So successful was exhuming the Holocaust from buried memory that the next chapter, “Oskar Schindler,” shows how Hollywood turned planet Auschwitz into a well known but more benign place. The last three chapters are named for places, “Auschwitz,” “Yad Vashem,” and “The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,” where Cole scores salient points contrasting the sites of genocide (now with tourist cafeteria), the Israeli museum (emphasizing partisans and resistance), and the “theme-park” $168-million-dollar facility in Washington, D.C. (featuring multimedia experiences and nondenominational tolerance). Cole dares to write “that an element of voyeurism is central to “Holocaust tourism.” “ If the Holocaust has assumed our century’s moral crown, this book dares to challenge the emperor’s clothes.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-415-92581-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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