A useful and welcome survey, though some may take issue with Ozment’s generalizations.
“Can a more than 2000-year-old civilization be defined by its last 150 years?” The answer here appears to be a qualified yes.
German history stretches into deep antiquity, writes Ozment (History/Harvard Univ.; Ancestors, 2001, etc.), though it properly fragments into tribal subcategories: the history of the Ostrogoths is not necessarily that of the Franks, the latter the subject of an uncomfortable truth—namely, that France and Germany share common ancestors in a “common barbarian past.” (A French scholar who pointed this out was sentenced to jail time in his homeland.) Why, then, do the French not speak German? Perhaps because, as Ozment observes, “By the standards of the ancient world, the Germanic tribes were magnanimous in triumph, allowing Roman language, law, government, and religion—Roman Christianity—to shape medieval Europe.” Ozment’s survey of German history packs a vast amount of information into a comparatively few number of pages, and it hits on all the expected high points: Charlemagne’s empire, the Reformation, Frederick the Great’s enlightened regime, the Bismarckian union of duchies, principalities, and free states to form modern Germany, while giving plenty of weight to the darker episodes, particularly the 12-year rule of Hitler. Can all of these historical data, and particularly those of more recent vintage, be used to construct a psychobiography of the German people, as so many have tried to do before? Ozment initially resists the idea, writing, “Germans are among the most difficult Europeans to fathom and the one European people without whom the story of that civilization cannot intelligibly be told.” Yet by the end of this well-told overview, he is comfortable in writing that the “present-day German is five persons in one, three of whom remain ineradicably German” and in hazarding the opinion that Germans of the future will be, if the past is a reliable guide, less given to individualism and more inclined to order, leading to “a tighter democracy by comparison with that of today.”
A useful and welcome survey, though some may take issue with Ozment’s generalizations.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-620925-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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