A penetrating work of paralinguistic analysis.
A brief but revealing semiotics of the swastika set.
In his first book published in English, Allert (Sociology and Social Psychology/Univ. of Frankfurt) has found a grand subject in a gesture at once ubiquitous and overlooked, the straight-arm salute that for a dozen years replaced traditional greetings in Germany and beyond. He observes that in all human societies a greeting is “an initial and symbolic gift to the person to whom it is addressed,” something that, with luck, signals that the person issuing it means no harm. As they subverted and perverted the German language, a subject the linguist George Steiner has brilliantly addressed, so the Nazis twisted the Heil greeting of old—something meaning, at root, to heal, to cure, to be healthy—to praise their dictator. As early as 1933, when they took power, the Nazi leadership was promulgating laws and codes related to how and when the salute was to be used while simultaneously attempting to purge German of old greetings such as auf Wiedersehen and Guten Tag. Training the populace thus was an important step in the militarization of German society, though, obligingly, non-Germans joined in: As Allert points out, the English and French delegations at the 1936 Olympics, “in a show of deference to their German hosts, entered the stadium with arms outstretched.” For their part, the Germans took to the change quickly, by Allert’s account in a matter of a few weeks. One German university student recounts a 1946 lecture in which the professor stretched out his arm, claiming that it was “an ancient gesture of blessing” and not an invention of totalitarian propagandists. The salute persists, Allert notes, but only among the “socially disaffected and economically vulnerable, who can count on the sheer scandal value of this publicly reviled gesture to garner media attention.” Allert concludes with a warning about the dangers inherent in obligatory rituals, presumably including salutes of other kinds.
A penetrating work of paralinguistic analysis.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8178-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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