The rise of the Third Reich achingly relived; the foreign correspondent's calling displayed. The second volume of Shirer's memoirs opens, in 1930, with the young Chicago Tribune reporter in India, covering Gandhi. In the next three years, he slips into warring Afghanistan (a then-to-now update); de-trains, impulsively at UR-JUNCTON (where Leonard Woolley has just uncovered evidence of the Flood); marries in Vienna, takes sick in India, loses his job and his sight in one eye (a Col. McCormick foible; a skiing accident); spends a year on the Spanish coast (writing an unpublishable novel, getting turn-downs from magazines, seeing the Spanish Republic totter); grabs at a copy-desk job on the Paris Herald; covers the rightist 1934 Paris riots (a footnote flashes forward to Vichy); and, apprehensive about Britain and France, gets the frontline post he wants—as a correspondent, with Hearst's Universal Service, in Nazi Berlin. The remaining, bulk of this incident-and-afterthought-crammed book could be called from Nuremberg to Nuremberg. Shirer, astounded by the Germans' enthusiasm for Hitler, their docility under repression, realizes that they yearn "to be strong again." He too finds the Fuhrer's eyes hypnotic, his voice mesmerizing. He reports church persecution—excessively: resistance made news, but most were untouched, unconcerned. Hitler moves into the Saar, rearms: "What will London and Paris do? Foolish question! They did nothing." Hitler marches into the Rhineland: "I was sure that if the French army had budged it would easily have turned back the Germans. . . and that would have been the end of Hitler and the Nazi Germany." (Hitler, we now know, agreed.) By the time of the Anschluss, Shirer will be with CBS—after another scary brush with unemployment. "I first met Ed Murrow in the lobby of the Adlon in Berlin at seven o'clock on Friday, August 27, 1937." Murrow hires him—after Ed Paley OKs his voice—to arrange broadcasts on the Continent, frustratingly. Witnessing the Anschluss, he flies to London and broadcasts the first "firsthand" report; within days, he and Murrow are setting up "the first world news roundup ever"—by correspondents in London, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and Rome. Shirer is scathing, throughout, about Chamberlain—and merciless about Munich: the Allies lost ground in the year's "breathing space," and quite possibly lost the USSR. Still to come: the Blitzkrieg, the German entry into Paris, the armistice at Compiegne. In 1940, hamstrung by the Nazis, Shirer leaves. . . to return briefly to Berlin ha ruins and the Nazis in the dock. Shirer is still pained, still jubilant—and, on a private level, both frank and gracious.
Pub Date: May 23, 1984
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1984
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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