A fine, discursive study of war and peace, and a worthy companion to the late German writer W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural...
A thoughtful examination, by a noted German social and “consciousness” historian, of what happens to victor and vanquished alike in the aftermath of war.
Why, wonders Schivelbusch (Tastes of Paradise, 1992), were Union officers so full of praise for the Southern cavaliers against whom they fought? Why did the Germans of 1918 so readily believe that Woodrow Wilson was an “honest broker in whose hands Germany entrusted its future”? Why were the defeated French, usually so quick to distinguish themselves from their neighbors, so eager to reform their educational system on the German model following defeat in 1870? Strange things happen to defeated countries, Schivelbusch responds, just as they do to bereaved individuals: first comes the denial, then the anger, and then the quest for a scapegoat (“the previous regime is held responsible both for leading the nation into the fateful misadventure of war and for directing it down a dead-end path long before the commencement of hostilities”). Finally, there’s some sort of accommodation that can involve the wholesale adoption of the former enemy’s customs. Similarly, conquerors often find themselves in tremendous sympathy with their defeated foe, so that, Schivelbusch writes, a generation of American intellectuals was inspired to move to France after WWI to become, for a time, Europeans. (But wasn’t the defeated foe Germany? Well, yes, Schivelbusch writes: but the real loser in WWI was Europe, the real winner America.) Schivelbusch tends to an essayistic, even impressionistic approach to history, but his pages are dense with documentable facts that speak to the horrors of war: one of every five Southerners died in the Civil War, one of every five Germans in WWII, one of every thirty Parisians in the ill-fated Commune. And some of his most interesting observations (such as his lengthy digression on the Volkswagen) come in the densely set, small-type endnotes, making every page worth a look.
A fine, discursive study of war and peace, and a worthy companion to the late German writer W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (Feb. 2003).Pub Date: April 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-4421-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
HISTORY | 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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