A riveting narrative bolstered by frequent, helpful citations.
Re-creation of “the first war-crimes trial after World War II,” which exposed the deep grief and anger at the Allied bombing of Germany.
Shot down on a bombing mission in their B-24 (called the Wham! Bam! Thank You Ma’am) on Aug. 26, 1944, eight American airmen were attacked by a mob of angry villagers of Rüsselsheim. Six died, and two miraculously escaped. Freeman (Troubled Water: Race, Mutiny, and Bravery on the USS Kitty Hawk, 2009, etc.) builds his chilling tale backward, from the moment the beaten men were stacked on a tumbrel headed for the town cemetery and Sgt. Sidney Eugene Brown watched surreptitiously as a villager finished each off with a blow by a two-by-four, to the final trial in Darmstadt in July 1945, led by prosecutor Lt. Col. Leon Jaworski (later famous as special prosecutor in the Watergate hearings). Jaworski had reviewed many files in postwar Germany and was convinced that “the Nazis had openly violated long-recognized rules of land warfare, as agreed to by the United States and Germany in the Hague Convention of 1907 as well as in the Geneva Convention of 1929.” Mistreatment of airmen shot down over Germany was not unusual, and German police were not obligated to help them. In Rüsselsheim, the guards accompanying the young men to a detention center abandoned them to the fury of the mob, incited by two sisters who sought vengeance for the firebombing of their houses. Jaworski believed this was a history-making trial, setting the tone for Nuremberg, as most of the participants were sentenced to hanging; his statements are as moving as the quotes from participants are shocking (the reverend who watched from his parsonage replied to the question why he had not tried to stop the violence: “It was not my task”).
A riveting narrative bolstered by frequent, helpful citations.Pub Date: May 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-230-10854-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
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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