paper 0-8071-2509-1 A solid political and economic history of the post-WWI period in France, gracefully written by an accomplished scholar (History/Louisiana State Univ.; Crime and Criminal Justice Under the Third Republic, not reviewed, etc.). It’s well known that France suffered greatly during the First World War. It paid a higher price than its allies in defeating Germany, losing over a million men on the Western Front. What is generally not known is the extent of the discord between the so-called Anglo-Saxon countries and France. The Versailles Treaty had no plan for rebuilding the German economy, only one for punishing Germany for starting the war. But the harsh economic provisions of the treaty were not enforced by Britain and the US. Yet France was pressed to repay its war debts to them, something it couldn—t do unless Germany paid its war reparations to France. Germany, experiencing mass unemployment and gross hyperinflation, defaulted on payments it probably could never have made. As a result, France occupied the German industrial region of the Ruhr in a vain attempt at self-preservation. While France suffered along with Germany, Britain stabilized and the US prospered. Martin tells the history of a France bolstered with the illusion of a return to the good prewar life and its disillusionment at the grim reality of postwar angst. He provides intimate portraits of the leading political figures of the day, Georges Clemenceau, Aristide Briand, and Raymond PoincarÇ. He describes in lengthy detail the squabbles between parties of the right and the left, and their ineffectiveness in solving the economic and political crises afflicting the nation. Economic statistics are excessively used at times, yet are offset by page-turning vignettes of the suicides, murders, and assassinations that an ailing populace inflicted on themselves in their despair. A crucial corrective that implicates Britain and the US as responsible parties in the ultimate rise of the German Third Reich and the fall of the French Third Republic. (5 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8071-2399-4
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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