The rise of the Third Reich achingly relived; the foreign correspondent's calling displayed. The second volume of Shirer's memoirs opens, in 1930, with the young Chicago Tribune reporter in India, covering Gandhi. In the next three years, he slips into warring Afghanistan (a then-to-now update); de-trains, impulsively at UR-JUNCTON (where Leonard Woolley has just uncovered evidence of the Flood); marries in Vienna, takes sick in India, loses his job and his sight in one eye (a Col. McCormick foible; a skiing accident); spends a year on the Spanish coast (writing an unpublishable novel, getting turn-downs from magazines, seeing the Spanish Republic totter); grabs at a copy-desk job on the Paris Herald; covers the rightist 1934 Paris riots (a footnote flashes forward to Vichy); and, apprehensive about Britain and France, gets the frontline post he wants—as a correspondent, with Hearst's Universal Service, in Nazi Berlin. The remaining, bulk of this incident-and-afterthought-crammed book could be called from Nuremberg to Nuremberg. Shirer, astounded by the Germans' enthusiasm for Hitler, their docility under repression, realizes that they yearn "to be strong again." He too finds the Fuhrer's eyes hypnotic, his voice mesmerizing. He reports church persecution—excessively: resistance made news, but most were untouched, unconcerned. Hitler moves into the Saar, rearms: "What will London and Paris do? Foolish question! They did nothing." Hitler marches into the Rhineland: "I was sure that if the French army had budged it would easily have turned back the Germans. . . and that would have been the end of Hitler and the Nazi Germany." (Hitler, we now know, agreed.) By the time of the Anschluss, Shirer will be with CBS—after another scary brush with unemployment. "I first met Ed Murrow in the lobby of the Adlon in Berlin at seven o'clock on Friday, August 27, 1937." Murrow hires him—after Ed Paley OKs his voice—to arrange broadcasts on the Continent, frustratingly. Witnessing the Anschluss, he flies to London and broadcasts the first "firsthand" report; within days, he and Murrow are setting up "the first world news roundup ever"—by correspondents in London, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and Rome. Shirer is scathing, throughout, about Chamberlain—and merciless about Munich: the Allies lost ground in the year's "breathing space," and quite possibly lost the USSR. Still to come: the Blitzkrieg, the German entry into Paris, the armistice at Compiegne. In 1940, hamstrung by the Nazis, Shirer leaves. . . to return briefly to Berlin ha ruins and the Nazis in the dock. Shirer is still pained, still jubilant—and, on a private level, both frank and gracious.
Pub Date: May 23, 1984
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1984
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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