Taylor’s history provides plenty of relevant lessons for today—and not only for Europe.
A well-organized, fast-moving political narrative situating the absolute breakdown of Germany's currency in 1923 in the double context of the international drive for World War I reparations and the violent effects of internal political extremism.
Royal Historical Society fellow Taylor (Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany, 2011, etc.) examines the historical span from the overthrow of the “once unshakeable representatives of the monarchical state” in November 1918 to the end of 1923 at the height of the crisis. The introduction of the “fixed-value Rentenmark” in November 1923 was followed rapidly by the beginning of new negotiations on reparations and apparent stability. Early on, Taylor identifies the major players in his drama. First, Erich Ludendorff, and his military associates, who seized on Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and launched their campaign against the betrayal of the armistice and the “stab-in-the-back” of the Versailles Treaty. Then, the author examines extremists of right and left, out of which the Nazis emerged. The former organized armed units under Ludendorff and assassinated leaders like Matthias Erzberger and Walther Rathenau, whom they associated with the Versailles sellout. The latter took to the streets and organized military units for Soviet-style revolution. Meanwhile, the Allies maintained their embargo on German food supplies and other trade until they were satisfied that reparations were forthcoming. Against this backdrop, Taylor methodically traces the fall of the currency and growth of the debt. By November 1923, a loaf of bread could be bought for 140 billion marks, and the middle class was left with next to nothing. Tax reforms and collections, social welfare cuts, impoverishment of students and government workers all played their part.
Taylor’s history provides plenty of relevant lessons for today—and not only for Europe.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-236-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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