Readable, if something of a footnote to history.
Did sibling rivalry lead to the slaughter that was World War I? This psychobiography makes a good case in the affirmative.
BBC documentarian Clay delivers only a bit of news, but lights up some of the shadows in the lives of the cousins who would become George V, Wilhelm II and Nicholas II. Georgie was a bit of a thickie, Willie a born victim and Nicky pleasing but ineffectual. Each, descended from Queen Victoria, had unusual burdens, but young Wilhelm had more than his share. Mauled by a doctor’s forceps on delivery, he could not easily do some of the things other boys of his age and class did, such as ride a horse or shoot a bow. When Nicky and Georgie came over to Germany to play, they often left Willie out of the proceedings; moreover, Nicky never liked Willie personally, and he “was snubbed by his English relations, again and again and often with relish, feeding his paranoia and playing right into the hands of the Anglophobes,” the Prussian nationalists who came to dominate his administration. Small wonder that as early as 1910, Germany was spoiling to go to war to avenge the slights against its thoroughly militarized (if, we learn, gay) emperor; small wonder that Wilhelm took the Triple Entente, which hemmed Germany between England and Russia, as a personal insult. Clay ventures that, though Tsar Nicholas was no help, George might have been able to negotiate a workable peace, since some difficult episodes with Queen Victoria had already demonstrated that Wilhelm was well capable of reason. As it happened, George was the only one of the cousins whose rule survived the vicious war that followed; the Bolsheviks executed Nicholas and his family, Wilhelm went into exile on the coast of Holland, railing daily against socialists and Jews, and the world lurched on toward a still greater catastrophe.
Readable, if something of a footnote to history.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1623-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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 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
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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