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
A brief but thoughtful essay outlining the terrible misapprehensions that led to escalating tensions between the US and the Soviet Union from the close of WW I to the end of the Korean conflict. Although anti-Bolshevik feelings ran high even at the time of the Russian Revolution, fear of the USSR didn't dominate American foreign policy until after WW II. Drawing on materials newly available from Soviet, East European, and Chinese archives, Leffler (winner of the 1993 Bancroft Prize for A Preponderance of Power) deftly traces the history of US-Soviet relations in prÇcis, from the Bolsheviks' rise to power through the uneasy truce in Korea. Begining as an ideological clash, the tension between the two nations only gradually became a power struggle as well. Indeed, it was only when the USSR became a player on the same global scale as the US (albeit considerably weaker in key strategic areas after the pounding it took during WW II) that the Soviets were perceived as an active threat abroad. On the other hand, seen through the distorting mirror of obsessive anti-Communism, domestic American radicals were regarded as a danger almost from the first murmur of the word ``Bolshevik'' in the popular press, and it was the specter of homegrown subversion rather than foreign invasion that haunted American policies for a long time. Leffler retells this often familiar material methodically, using the new documentation to reveal Stalin as hesitant and tentative in foreign policy, primarily concerned with erecting a security buffer around Russia rather than building an evil empire. The portrait that emerges is of two superpowers-in-formation engaged in a grim dialogue of the deaf, with terrible consequences for humanity. Although much of the ground covered is well trod, this is an admirably complete introduction to the history of the Cold War.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8090-8791-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Grounding his story in documentary and fragmentary archaeological evidence, British archaeologist Hume (Martin's Hundred, 1982) tantalizingly reconstructs the history of the earliest English settlements in America. The British drive for colonies grew out of England's 16th- century rivalry with Spain; hence the earliest English settlements in America were planted in the midst of the ``Terra Florida'' that explorers had claimed for the Spanish crown. After some abortive attempts to create an English foothold in the New World, Sir Walter Raleigh sent more than 100 English colonists under gentleman-artist John White to lay claim to the land the Elizabethans called ``Virginia.'' They landed in Roanoke, in what is now North Carolina, in July 1587. After establishing a fort and colony, White and some members of the group returned to England. When several more English ships arrived in Roanoke in 1589, the colony had vanished with few, cryptic traces. Hume painstakingly reviews the sparse evidence, both from contemporary journals and from modern forays over the site, of the Lost Colony: Almost surely, the settlers were massacred by Indians, although little evidence exists today either of their presence at Roanoke or of their fate. Similarly, Hume tracks the more successful but often tragic history of the Jamestown settlement from its birth in 1607, using artifacts and journals of the period to trace the colony's growth from its unpromising beginning as a small disease-ridden group of adventurers into a prosperous community. Hume focuses particularly on the relationship between the settlers and the Indians, which went from mutual idealization to demonization within a few years. This culminated in the 1622 slaughter by the Indian chief Opechancanough of English settlers in the area around Jamestown and an English backlash against the natives that spelled the ultimate doom of their culture. Hume breaks little novel historical ground, although he eloquently recounts the archaeological record and brings alive the lost settlements of the early American past with wit and style. (164 illustrations) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1994
ISBN: 0-394-56446-4
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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