A little-known tale whose significance the author trumpets a bit too brassily.
Infuriated by the ousting of Mussolini in July 1943, Hitler ordered his minions to plan and execute the kidnapping of Pope Pius XII and the plundering of the Vatican’s treasures.
Kurzman, who specializes in war and disaster (No Greater Glory, 2004, etc.), believes he has found the key to understanding Pius XII’s reluctance to condemn the Holocaust. Although no official Nazi documents have emerged to confirm the story, numerous interviews of the principals leave little doubt that Pius XII was concerned that his active opposition to the Germans would seriously threaten the Church (especially in Germany), the Vatican and his life. Although Kurzman does not specify when he conducted his interviews, he mentions them frequently, especially key ones with SS General Karl Wolff, a man whose hands dripped Holocaust gore, but who nonetheless recognized the folly of Hitler’s seize-the-Vatican order and who realized that Germany was going to lose the war and was hoping to accommodate himself to the ensuing new world order. He initially hoped to broker a separate peace—to convince the Allies (the Western ones) to focus on the Soviets, whose post-war imperial designs were evident. That initiative went nowhere, but Wolff did surrender the entire German army in Italy two days after Hitler’s suicide. The author at times relates this story in a sort of breathless prose (using exclamation points in case we miss the urgency), and he seems oddly hesitant to denounce outright Pius XII’s behavior (including his failure to speak out when the Nazis rounded up the Jews of Rome and shipped them to Auschwitz), leaving that job to other historians whose judgments he records. Of greatest interest is Wolff’s delicate dance: appeasing the ever-impatient, impulsive and dangerous Hitler; finessing the frightened Pope; protecting himself and his family.
A little-known tale whose significance the author trumpets a bit too brassily.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-306-81468-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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