An utterly absorbing account of German Jewry from the early 18th century to the Holocaust as reflected in six individuals (five men and one woman) who were ancestors of the author’s. Blumenthal, himself a German-Jewish refugee to the US via Shanghai, former CEO of the Burroughs Corporation (now Unisys) and a former secretary of the treasury, focuses almost exclusively on Prussia and in particular on Berlin and its suburb of Oranienberg. He shows how precarious the position of Prussia’s small Jewish community was until the second half of the 19th century. Yet once Prussia’s Jews were “emancipated” (granted basic civic and political rights) in 1867, an already existing assimilationist drive among them intensified; Louis Blumenthal, an Oranienberg town councillor and banker, posited that —emancipation and assimilation go hand in hand.” During the golden age of German liberalism (roughly 1848—1914) a confluence also existed between the values of successful German Jews and their gentile counterparts; both were committed to Bildung und Besitz (education and property). And while earlier generations of German Jews, such as Rachel Varnhagen, hostess to a widely attended early 19th century intellectual salon, and composer Giacomo Meyerbeer were scarred by anti-Semitism, later 19th century German-Jewish intellectuals often tried to be oblivious to it. During the Weimar Republic (1919—33), when German society was thrown into upheaval by the legacy of defeat in WW I, a new, often chaotic experiment in democracy, hyperinflation, and depression, the Jewish romance with things German would of course have fatal consequences for those who chose to remain. Blumenthal beautifully weaves together individual stories, the history of the Jewish community, and developments in the larger German society. While those who desire an in-depth scholarly history of German Jewry might wish to turn elsewhere (though, as his extensive bibliography reveals, Blumenthal has more than done his homework), this is the book for those desiring a crisply written, personal, anecdotally rich history of a glorious and ultimately tragic community.
Pub Date: May 15, 1998
ISBN: 1-887178-73-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
HISTORY | JEWISH | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
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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