by Alexandra Richie ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 9, 2013
A massively researched, profoundly unsettling work revealing how the battle for Warsaw exposed the perfidy of East and West...
A sympathetic delineation of one of the grimmest chapters in a savage war.
Though neither a World War II scholar nor military expert, Richie (Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin, 1998) has the advantages of living in Warsaw and familiarity with the location and resources—e.g., a collection of underground newspapers from the war years. As a result, her work exploring what she considers a largely unexposed episode at war’s end—not to be confused with the suicidal Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943—remains engrossing despite the nearly unreadable catalog of horrors inflicted on the victims. The Polish people had been resisting German occupation since the first bombing and invasion in September 1939. Early on, Soviet collusion with Germany in carving up the country left Poles wary of any collaboration, which would have crucial consequences in the summer of 1944, when communication between the Polish and the approaching Soviets might have helped bolster a defense of the city. By June 1944, the Soviets had launched Operation Bagration, creating havoc for the German Army Group Centre and causing nearly half a million casualties. To everyone’s amazement, the Germans began to withdraw from Warsaw until the assassination attempt on Hitler in July, which shook his trust in his generals and elevated Heinrich Himmler and his minions. Warsaw was declared a “fortress city,” to be held at all costs, and a stunning German counteroffensive, engineered by Field Marshal Walter Model, pushed the Soviets out just as the Polish underground army gave the fateful signal to start the uprising. The consequences for Poles and their city were devastating and complete, what the author calls “a Polish Götterdämmerung which would play out before an indifferent world.”
A massively researched, profoundly unsettling work revealing how the battle for Warsaw exposed the perfidy of East and West alike.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-28655-2
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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