An enduring, informed contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust.
This scholarly biography of the most notorious female SS concentration camp guard pursues a fuller portrait than the caricature shaped during her 1945 war crimes trial.
Brown (The Camp Women: 2002, etc.) scours documentary evidence and interviews with surviving witnesses for clues to explain why Irma Grese, only 22 when she was hanged three months after her trial, became part of the SS killing machinery. She grew up 50 miles north of Berlin in a rural community where her father was a dairyman. When Grese was 12, her mother committed suicide by drinking hydrochloric acid. At 14, Grese left school, worked menial jobs, apprenticed as a nursing aide and joined Nazi youth groups. After an incident with a pistol, her father banished her. Brown surveys the environment in which Nazism and Grese came of age together and concludes: “After serious conflict with her father and following the futility of attempting to find her niche in business, medicine, and farming, she sensed a genuine feeling of accomplishment as an SS Aufseherin.” Nazi ideology filled a void. Less clear is why she so thoroughly embraced the sadistic brutality that marked her tenures at Ravensbruck, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. Brown’s scholarship is solid and exhaustive. A six-page glossary, historical photos, appendix of supporting documents, extensive source list, and index supplement the text. Footnotes often fill one-fourth of the page, creating an almost parallel narrative. The writing is clear and fluid, but the text, riddled with German terms, and the research the author crams into footnotes will challenge casual readers. The notes should be read and perhaps should have been incorporated into the narrative. First published in 1996, Brown updated this second edition in 2004, six years before retiring as a dean at Moorpark College. Given the growth of women’s studies programs, it’s easy to imagine new sources informing another update, but this work holds up well and remains relevant.
An enduring, informed contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2004
ISBN: 978-0-930860-15-8
Page Count: 143
Publisher: Albrecht
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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