A cogent, well-written contribution to legal and military history, and fitting tribute to a principled man.
A “remarkable man” is honored, half a century after the fact, for his role in bringing Nazi war criminals to justice.
By the end of 1948, William Denson “had prosecuted more Nazis than any other lawyer in the entire postwar period”: 177 prison guards and officers in all, every one of whom was found guilty, nearly a hundred of whom were sentenced to death. Yet his legal successes at proving the guilt of the butchers of Dachau, Mauthausen, and Buchenwald were overshadowed even at the time by the more widely publicized prosecutions of the German political leadership at Nuremburg. Greene (Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, 2000) revisits the prosecution, sharply noting how the overwhelming evidence of Nazi crimes converted Denson from a detached, scholarly student of the conflict who believed that “even the most decent human being, subjected to the right pressures, is capable of doing things he could never imagine himself doing” to a committed avenger of the wrongs the Nazis inflicted. To effect that legal retribution, Greene writes, Denson had the formidable task of proving that the Nazi regime was by definition a criminal enterprise; he also “made damn sure there was independent evidence corroborating what the defendant had done” rather than rely solely on the testimony of former concentration-camp inmates. Denson’s legal prowess was overcome, not by the defense—his German opponent, sounding much like Maximilian Schell in Judgment at Nuremburg, was surely brilliant—but by the politics of the Cold War, by which the American government exerted pressure on the military to sweep aside Nazi crimes in the interest of lining West Germany squarely on its side against the Soviet Union. One result, Greene writes, was the early freeing of the so-called “bitch of Buchenwald,” a female guard whom Buckner characterized as “a sadistic pervert of monumental proportions, unmatched in history.” Buckner lost the argument against commutation and wound up as “the Army’s principal critic,” a stand that cost him much in those early days of McCarthyism.
A cogent, well-written contribution to legal and military history, and fitting tribute to a principled man.Pub Date: April 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0879-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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