An engagingly written, if often speculative and flawed, biography of the Polish-German-Jewish youth Herschel Grynszpan, whose November 7, 1938, assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris served as the Nazis' pretext for Kristallnacht. Marino, a young British critic and screenwriter, has engaged in no original research, but relied almost exclusively on two previous biographies of his subject. Grynszpan apparently was motivated by short-term rage; his parents were among the 12,000 Polish Jews residing in Germany whom the Nazis ``dumped'' back in their native land in October 1938, and who suffered in a border ``no man's land'' when the Poles refused to accept them. In the hyperventilated and sometimes hagiographic prose that too often characterizes this book, Marino tries to transform the 17-year-old Herschel's deed into something far larger; he makes the utterly unsubstantiated and ludicrous claim that Grynszpan somehow intuited the Holocaust: ``Herschel saw into Hitler's black heart and knew what the dictator was planning.'' Marino does provide some interesting circumstantial evidence that vom Rath may actually have been cooperating with the French intelligence service, but he is unable to document anything conclusively. The second half of his book is the more interesting, for here the author looks at the strange series of bureaucratic accidents and foul-ups, historical contingencies and wild charges (such as that vom Rath had sexually exploited him) that caused the Germans never to try Grynszpan. In fact, his ultimate fate is unknown; the Gestapo may have murdered Grynszpan in 1942, after he spent time in the VIP section of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, or in 1945, a few months before the war ended. Rumors have even circulated that he survived under an assumed identity. Marino muses at length on this and a great deal more. Thus, what emerges is a padded, somewhat superficial biography that, from its subtitle on, makes highly inflated claims about its subject.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-571-19921-6
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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