For all its wealth of tales of espionage and intrigue, the narrative is bone dry and repetitive. Le Carré fans, be warned:...
A tale of the forgotten heroes of the German resistance—forgotten because few Americans, at least, ever noticed them in the first place.
It was a matter of Allied policy, spearheaded by the American government, to demand unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. That policy, argue von Hassell—the grandson of an executed resistance leader—and MacRae, “left the ‘other Germany’ not even the smallest toehold,” since no electoral argument could be made that by deposing Hitler and his regime, Germany might be saved. The result was that the military officers who made up a good part of the resistance—which, unlike in France, was never coordinated, and not very effective—were forced to seek Hitler’s removal by other means, leading to attempted assassinations and coups. One of the most interesting of the resistance figures, for various reasons, was German military intelligence chief Wilhelm Canaris, whose initial enthusiasm for the Nazi regime was tempered well before the onset of war. Canaris’s Abwehr (the German intelligence organization) became a fertile recruiting ground for Allied spymasters seeking double agents, though when those spymasters—notable among them Allen Dulles—reported to Washington that the Nazi state had influential domestic enemies, they were ignored. Though the book’s subtitle is overstated, von Hassell and MacRae turn up a few interesting matters that history has overlooked or merely glanced at once or twice, including American efforts to stave off war (abandoned, they assert, because his advisors worried in the 1940 election year that FDR might be “accused of appeasement”). FDR’s emissary was a General Motors executive with many contacts inside the Reich, where American corporations did a solid trade; von Hassell and MacRae extend the list of companies guilty of “trading with the enemy” to include Kodak, another small bit of news.
For all its wealth of tales of espionage and intrigue, the narrative is bone dry and repetitive. Le Carré fans, be warned: It takes doing to make wartime Istanbul seem drab.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-32369-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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 Yorkerstaff 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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