Heart-rending documents of Anne Frank’s family, both before and after the devastating events of the war.
As the German translator of the unexpurgated edition of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, Pressler brings to this family memoir tremendous care, knowledge and dignity. The task of tracing the life of Anne’s father, Otto Frank, and his mother, Alice Frank, shattered by the Nazi war machine and virulent anti-Semitism, was given to Pressler by Gerti Elias, the wife of Otto Frank’s nephew; Gerti became the caretaker of her in-laws old home in Basel, Switzerland, where some of the family had moved in 1933 from Frankfurt, when life under the new Nazi regime became too onerous. While Otto moved from Frankfurt with his young family to try to restart his business in Amsterdam, his mother resettled in Basel, and in the attic of her house, a treasure of letters and photographs had been stored for years. Among them, incredibly, are the first missives from Otto to his mother in 1945 on stationery from the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he had miraculously survived after being separated from his wife and two daughters, Margot and Anne, in September 1944, and still knew nothing of their fate. Subsequent letters reveal the crushing news that Edith had died from illness in January, and the girls in March at Bergen-Belsen. Pressler focuses on the pre-war life of Alice Frank, whose family had prospered amid the ghettos of Frankfurt. The author also pursues the career of Alice’s grandson, Buddy (once playmate of Anne Frank), who enjoyed—in a terrible parallel irony—a successful stage and ice-skating career all while the war was destroying the lives of his family.
Pub Date: April 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-53339-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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