A story of disgusting people doing disgusting things, told with relish and undisguised disdain.
The author of Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing (2009) returns with the disturbing story of the pro-Nazi movement that grew in 1930s America—until legal troubles and Pearl Harbor destroyed both the mad dreams and the dreamers.
Bernstein begins with a moment almost impossible to imagine: a 1939 pro-Nazi rally held in Madison Square Garden to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. Tens of thousands were involved, including some 17,000 cops to keep control of the 100,000 protestors outside. (The author returns later with much more detail about the event.) Bernstein focuses on Fritz Julius Kuhn, born in Munich, a young man at the time Hitler began his improbable ascent to power. The author follows Kuhn to the United States, where he eventually became a citizen, and tells about his employment with Henry Ford, another who was dazzled by Hitler and besotted by anti-Semitism. Kuhn joined the Bund, worked his way into the position of Bundesführer and thereafter lived with blithe disregard for social conventions. The Bund found lots of supporters—on both coasts and in between—in Depression-era America, though it had some high-profile opponents, as well, including columnist Walter Winchell, who regularly blasted them. They founded publications and youth and women’s groups—in the youth camp, it seems, there was some sexual activity along with the canoeing and propaganda. Bernstein tells us about the odd outreach to Native Americans and reminds us of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here (about a fascist takeover of America). Eventually, the authorities in New York—Fiorello La Guardia and Thomas Dewey among them—decided they’d had enough and went after Kuhn. They got him, and he spent some jail time and ended up in Europe, dead and forgotten.
A story of disgusting people doing disgusting things, told with relish and undisguised disdain.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00671-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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