A highly thorough yet refreshingly concise examination of the follies and failures of the great peace of Nov. 11, 1918. A...
A unique look at the end of World War I from a vast array of nationalities.
The war was fought by empires and their subjects in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. From the Czechs desperate for their own homeland to the Arabs who gained freedom from the Ottoman Empire, the end of the war delivered fulfillment, postponement, and desperation. Schönpflug (History/Free Univ., Berlin; co-editor: Gender History in a Transnational Perspective: Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders, 2014, etc.) offers a cogent, illuminating narrative based on an astounding amount of research. He includes minutiae such as the birth of the poppy as well as the end of a host of empires—Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German—and he deftly incorporates numerous individual reactions to the first days of peace, including that of Harry Truman. As the author ably demonstrates, the conceptions of peace among the Allies were widely varied. France demanded draconian reparations, as opposed to Woodrow Wilson’s lofty ideals. The English and other Europeans, constrained by traditions and their vassals, proposed more viable solutions. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, particularly national self-determination, encouraged people like the Irish, Vietnamese, Indians, Czechs, and Syrians and frightened the empires who guarded their holdings—however, their hope was to be postponed. Germany was without a viable government, and the Allies refused to supply food until there was a democratically elected government. Since Berlin was rife with revolutionary movements, this was nearly impossible. The author also checks in on contemporary artists and writers such as Paul Klee, Georges Grosz, and Virginia Woolf, who all expressed disappointment and rage at the circumstances around them. “Instead of bringing about the peace so passionately longed for,” writes Schönpflug, “the bitter struggle for a better future only brought new violence and claimed millions of new victims.”
A highly thorough yet refreshingly concise examination of the follies and failures of the great peace of Nov. 11, 1918. A must for World War I collections.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62779-762-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | 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 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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