The author of turns his perceptive eye and mind on the Europe of 1950-51, at the mid century mark. This is a more philosophical and contemplative appraisal, a less personal and anecdotal one than might have been anticipated. He shares little with his reader of what he saw and did, but shares instead the conclusions he has drawn, and gives a backward look at those forces in history that have produced the conditions — history that, after a slow evolution produced in a short time profound changes. This is the theme of his story. He takes one with him first to Austria, which he feels can never live again as a nation, then to France, where an unfinished revolution brought defeat and humiliation, not yet resolved. Next to Germany, a country he had known intimately where he sees again evidence that Naziism and the old German disease survive, the new West German republic only a facade while the Allied Control does nothing. England he sees as the result of a generation of complacent refusal to face reality now at a point of exhaustion (for which we should share the blame). The Conservatives cannot undo history. In the European Union, despite Britain's abstention, he sees hope for the future, a limping start in the powerless Council of Europe, but a tangible evidence in the European Army and NATO, in SHAPE under Eisenhower, in the Schuman Plan. Finally, returning to America, he acknowledges evidences of coming of age, but deplores our unsolved problems of distribution, the schizophrenia of our thinking, the atmosphere of intolerance and fear, our ignorance of history, our moral cowardice. We must prove ourselves:- NOW. Shirer's name carries weight to counterbalance a public apathy towards books that make us think.
Pub Date: May 16, 1952
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Young
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1952
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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