A monumental history accessible to a mass audience. “Crude” was how Goethe described the city of Berlin in 1778, while Stendhal wondered why anyone would construct a city in such a desolate place. When it was named the capital of the new nation in 1871, other Germans grumbled that Berlin was too Prussian, militaristic, Protestant, and new. Lacking the shine of Paris or the glory of Rome, Berlin nonetheless has been at the center of European history no less than its more glamorous cousins. Although remembered more for Bismarck and Hitler—whose ghosts still hover over the city—Berlin was also the home of the Enlightenment in Germany and a creative art scene in the 19th and early 20th centuries, until such pursuits were stamped out by National Socialism. Richie, a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is a descendent of the Von Moltke family, which has been a major protagonist in the city’s history. Critical to understanding Berlin is the municipality’s conception of itself as the City of German Destiny, a conception that has perhaps done more damage to the metropolis than any foreign occupying army. Equally critical for modern Berlin has been the way German unification was achieved—through “blood and the sword” in Bismarck’s memorable phrase, rather than noble ideals. Epigraphs from Goethe’s Faust appropriately open each chapter. Richie dwells at length on the Weimar Republic and doesn—t fail to examine German Expressionism, architecture, cinema, theater. But this art history is merely part of a sweeping canvas that succinctly covers several centuries of changing politics, economics, and social conditions, from absolutism to romanticism; from nationalism to socialism and, tragically, National Socialism. Richie weaves a colorful tapestry and, in the process, adroitly separates fact from fiction, myth from history. The illustrations are plentiful and illuminating, and the writing is a pleasure. Historians should take note: This is the way to reach a mass audience.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7867-0510-8
Page Count: 984
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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