A series of imaginative and fanciful narrative segments—a history that is not all gloom and doom.
Berlin’s greatest hits, from the age of the medieval troubadour to David Bowie’s “Heroes.”
Canadian travel writer MacLean (Gift of Time: A Family's Diary of Cancer, 2011, etc.) walks through Berlin’s fluctuating, unstable past and plucks personalities that best represent the spirit of the city, good or evil, reaching all the way back to the 15th century. He seeks “to map this place, divided as it is between past and present, conformity and rebellion, the visible and the invisible.” Berlin, writes the author, “was never an ethnic German city,” but it always attracted newcomers; during times of plague, there were influxes of Franks, Flemings, Rhinelanders and Danes, as well as Jews—the oldest Jewish gravestone is from 1244. The accession of the austerely militaristic Calvinist Hohenzollern dynasty transformed Berlin from a garrison to a great and beautiful city under the enlightened despot Frederick the Great, who was able to lure Voltaire there to live and work in 1750. MacLean’s minibiographies underscore the highly idiosyncratic temperament these characters imparted to the city, and in his own fictionalized, stylized portraits, he offers the artistically brilliant—such as 19th-century architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose Altes Museum, among other fantastically neoclassical creations, helped forge a sense of a capital city—as well as the obscure and mythical, such as Silesian factory worker Lilli Neuss, a terrible casualty of the mid-19th-century industrial revolution, whose husband deserted her and took their son, leaving her to an impecunious and miserable fate. The city nurtured plenty of evil, as well—e.g., Fritz Haber, the chemist who won the Nobel Prize and offered effective chemical warfare to the Kaiser in 1915 in the form of chlorine; and Hitler’s fanatical mythmakers, including Leni Riefenstahl, Albert Speer and Joseph Goebbels.
A series of imaginative and fanciful narrative segments—a history that is not all gloom and doom.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-05186-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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