A few chapters will elicit a response of “so what?” But there’s enough adventure, gore, and mystery to make this volume...
Hitler’s love child and other shocking speculations.
In the mode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Milton (Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin’s Plot for Global Revolution, 2014, etc.) has assembled an easily digestible compendium of historical oddities about the famous and infamous, including Hitler and Lenin, Agatha Christie (who went missing, inexplicably, for 11 days in 1926), Charles Lindbergh, and a 19th-century eccentric who proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. As he romps through the past, the author introduces a physician who plied Hitler with “an extraordinary cocktail of drugs, many of which are these days classed as dangerous, addictive, and illegal”; a pair of lovers who had a hard time poisoning the woman’s husband; a shipwrecked party who resorted to cannibalism; and a “prolific murderess” of infants. Some vignettes highlight bizarre coincidences: a man who survived the bombing of Hiroshima fled to Nagasaki, only to experience yet another “blinding white flash.” In 1945, Pastor Archie Mitchell and his pregnant wife took five schoolchildren on a picnic in southern Oregon. Suddenly, there was an explosion—a new Japanese weapon, a balloon bomb, killed everyone except Mitchell. In 1960, serving as a missionary in Vietnam, he was captured by the Viet Cong, never to be seen again. Some episodes, such as Hitler’s last days, the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapping, Adolf Eichmann’s capture, and a Japanese soldier’s insistent fighting of World War II until 1974, may be familiar to history buffs. Less known is the story of Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker, who smuggled Jewish babies out of Poland; Ota Benga, an African pygmy, who, in 1906, was caged with monkeys at the Bronx Zoo; and South African Sarah Baartman, forced to exhibit herself as the “Hottentot Venus.”
A few chapters will elicit a response of “so what?” But there’s enough adventure, gore, and mystery to make this volume mostly entertaining.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07877-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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 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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