An engaging meditation on the possibility of reconciliation between the Germans and American Jews who are the grandchildren of the Holocaust generation. Krondorfer is a German academic living in the US. Since the late 1980s he has been organizing encounter groups of college-age American Jews with their German counterparts. His book—in part a report on these therapeutic adventures in Germany and the US, but also an imaginative exploration of themes relating to understanding of the Holocaust—is informative and original. In order to break through the encrustations of stale rhetoric that have accumulated around the topic ``Holocaust'' in both cultures, Krondorfer establishes a ``ritual'' setting in which the anxiety, guilt, anger, and other emotions experienced by the grandchildren's generation can emerge and be discussed. Toward this end he has organized summer programs for students, as well as the Jewish- German Dance Theater, which has performed both in America and in Germany. Their performances have been the scene of sometimes productive, often brutally frank discussions of what it means to be an inheritor of German shame or of Jewish victimhood. Apart from occasional incidents of outright anti-Semitism in Germany, the dancers found that some Germans resented bitterly what they see as not simply Jews but Americans opening old wounds, subverting the young, encouraging them to break family taboos by asking questions about the extent of family members' involvement in Nazi crimes. Some Jewish survivors in the US resented seeing young Jews together with young Germans and having ``their'' Holocaust taken from them by the dancers. Such setbacks notwithstanding, Krondorfer found many people of good will in both countries. Krondorfer's book is theoretically sophisticated, but its strength comes from its vivid, thoughtful accounts of his own and his students' lived experience in Germany and the US.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-300-05959-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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