Adds fresh color and texture to the evolving, increasingly detailed portrait of der Führer.
Ryback (The Last Survivor, 1999) investigates the reading habits of a man better known for burning books than collecting them.
Hitler owned some 16,000 volumes contained in private libraries at three separate residences, the author notes. Ryback examines the two principal surviving portions, the larger at the Library of Congress, the other at Brown University. Arranging the chapters chronologically, he takes us through Hitler’s reading interests from World War I until the night before his suicide, speculating that in those final hours he might have read from Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great, a favorite historical figure. Hitler liked to read biographies of powerful men and books about the military; he owned a copy of Theodore Roosevelt’s account of the Spanish-American War. He enjoyed thrillers and the Westerns of bestselling German author Karl May. Naturally, he favored titles that celebrated Aryans and their apparent superiority, including philosophical tracts; Fichte was a favorite. He had several collections of photographs, given to him, and fondly inscribed by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Ryback also provides a useful account of Hitler’s own literary ambitions. He discusses the composition and publication of Mein Kampf, noting its “vacuous intellectual content and its painfully flawed grammar,” and he assesses a damaged 324-page typescript that is all that remains of a manuscript dealing with Germany’s role in the world. The author tries to extract as much significance as he can from Hitler’s textual marks, but this is an uncertain and perhaps even pointless pursuit, since it’s not always clear who made the marks. Ryback notes more definitively the influences of writers Julius Friedrich Lehmann and Maximilian Riedel. An afterword properly credits Philipp Gassert and Daniel S. Mattern’s scholarly The Hitler Library (2001) as a “road map” for his own work.
Adds fresh color and texture to the evolving, increasingly detailed portrait of der Führer.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4204-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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