by John Borneman & Jeffrey M. Peck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1995
Eleven marginally Jewish subjects talk about their lives as Jews in East, West, and united Germany. While Germany abounds with younger Jewish immigrants from Israel and the former Soviet Union who could speak about the inherent conflicts of being Jews in post-Holocaust Germany, Borneman (Anthropology/Cornell Univ.; After the Wall, 1991, etc.) and Peck (German/Georgetown Univ.) have chosen interviewees (several in their 80s) who are Jews in name only (one asks, ``How could we Germans [perpetrate the Holocaust]?'') and are too committed to GDR socialism to convey much conflict about their choice of home country. Moreover, too many of the men and women interviewed here are academics or journalists themselves, including another ethnographer. The authors interrupt the interviews with their often unnecessary analysis to further prevent the reader from interacting with the subjects, and their prose is excruciatingly jargon-laden and pedantic: ``It makes a historical constructivist (i.e., antiracial, antiessentialist) argument, maintaining that Jewish identity is syncretic and entails multiple subject positions.'' The book only sputters to life with scattered revelations about decisions to return to Germany, how the reality of Soviet gulags only emerged after Gorbachev, misconceptions held about the US and Israel, the decrease in banality and increase in danger in a united Berlin, and, on the authors' part, why being gay and single facilitates the writing of exorbitant overseas projects like this one. A potentially intriguing subject, but the authors miss the real story by taking such an oddly unrepresentative group of subjects.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8032-1255-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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