A fine history that brings back to light the contributions of the younger, often forgotten resistance fighters.
An exploration of the reasons so many young French citizens stepped up to work against Nazi occupiers and the “traitorous” Vichy government.
As Rosbottom (French and European Studies/Amherst Coll.; When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944, 2014) shows, World War II interrupted their developmental time frame, forcing them into an adulthood for which they were little prepared. There are many common threads in the memoirs the author was able to source—e.g., patriotic pride and hatred of the occupiers; strong Jewish identity—but a moral certainty of right and wrong was the dominant characteristic in all of them. Many practiced soft resistance, including art, propaganda, false documents, and minor but persistent sabotage. Others used hard resistance: intelligence-gathering, assassinations, derailments, etc. By far the most organized were the young communists, who had funding from Russia and accepted and encouraged girls to join. Under Stalin’s orders not to attack their occupiers after the 1939 treaty with Hitler, the youth concentrated on undermining the German-backed Vichy government and the French police who worked directly with the Germans. Hitler’s invasion of Russia ended that ban. The cultural and social phenomena affecting students before the war—film, jazz, dancing, and a new taste of freedom—guided them. They were not driven by politics and didn’t think of the dangers to themselves or their families. At first, their youth, especially for girls, protected them. When the SS and Gestapo took over in 1942, everyone was suspect, and security tightened considerably. Rosbottom uses impressive character studies to drive his narrative—e.g., a 17-year-old who was executed as a reprisal; a blind young man who became a natural leader both in the Resistance and during the many months he spent in prison. Early resisters were disorganized, confused, and incompetent, but they learned quickly.
A fine history that brings back to light the contributions of the younger, often forgotten resistance fighters.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-247002-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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