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
In his first nonfiction work, noted Native American novelist Welch (The Indian Lawyer, 1990, etc.) stretches the boundaries of history. With the research assistance of Stekler, Welch offers a sweeping history of the American West based on work the pair did for their 1992 PBS documentary, The Last Stand. Though centered on the Battle of the Little Big Horn, in which warriors led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeated Custer's 7th Cavalry, the volume actually chronicles white/Indian contact and conflict from the voyage of Lewis and Clark in 1804 to the present—from the viewpoint of the Indians. Welch begins by describing the 1869 massacre of a band of his own Blackfeet people and his efforts to locate the forgotten site of the carnage. He then moves on to the story of Custer, a Civil War hero who was demoted following the war and sent to fight Indians on the Western frontier. His conduct at the Washita Massacre, during which he and his men wiped out Black Kettle's peaceful Cheyenne, called his abilities into question and demonstrated the character and leadership flaws that would help bring about his death eight years later. Brash, cavalier, and supremely confident, Custer embodied America's larger self-image. His death, in the worst military disaster of the Indian Wars, thus assumed mythic proportions, aided by a relentless publicity campaign by his widow. Welch traces the fates of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull following the famous battle and uses accounts of such other engagements as Sand Creek and the Fetterman Massacre to help put Little Big Horn in historical perspective. A late chapter personalizes the text, as Welch tells the story of his mother and his early desire to become a writer. An excellent Native version of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: a sad tale that, despite momentary triumphs like Little Big Horn, could not but end tragically for the Indians. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03657-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Wyatt-Brown (History/Univ. of Florida; Southern Honor, not reviewed, etc.) buries a good idea under an avalanche of scholarly detail. Too much of this study is concerned with the first Percys in America, an interesting but not exceptional bunch of slaveholding frontiersmen led by one ``Don Carlos'' Percy, an apparent bigamist who also seems to have shared the Percy predisposition to melancholia. His other legacies to future Percys were a fondness for Stoicism, Catholicism, conservatism, and an aristocratic sense of honor. Thus Wyatt-Brown's thesis (i.e., ax) to demonstrate (i.e., grind): that generations of Percys are linked by the ethics of chivalry, the tendency to chronic depression, and the predilection for mythmaking. Among the mythmakers were two 19th- century sisters (Wyatt-Brown calls them ``two Southern Brontâs'') who churned out mediocre verse and commonplace gothic fiction. A later relative, Sarah Dorsey, achieved minor fame as a postCivil War romance novelist and major notoriety as the close friend of the married Jefferson Davis, with whom she bemoaned the decline of the South during Reconstruction. Real distinction came in the 20th century with LeRoy Percy, a US senator from Mississippi, who was an ardent foe of the Ku Klux Klan. His son, the poet William Alexander Percy, shared the same sense of noblesse oblige. ``A bachelor with severe inhibitions'' (i.e., a closeted homosexual), Will eventually published Lanterns on the Levee, a classic of the modern South. Walker Percy's grandfather (the senator's brother) and father both committed suicide, but the novelist worked through his existential melancholy, argues Wyatt-Brown, by creating many fine works of fiction. No literary critic, Wyatt-Brown forgets why most readers would pick up this book in the first place. He barely mentions Walker Percy until well over 200 pages into the book, by which time most nonhistorians are likely to have set it aside.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-505626-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
