by Danny Orbach ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2016
A dense but gripping look at a historical counternarrative that remains relevant and disturbing.
A robust history of the German conspiracy against Nazism.
Orbach (History and East Asian Studies/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) combines intellectual inquiry with thriller dynamics, explaining that “resistance to Hitler…is a field in which historical arguments are not purely academic but wrought through with passions.” The author acknowledges both the admirable aims and ultimate shortcomings of the conspirators, arguing that their story, culminating in Operation Valkyrie in 1944, is deceptively complex, while the plotters’ moral standings remain subject to competing interpretations. Today, he notes, many doubt “not only the moral integrity of the conspirators and their motives but their military skill as well.” Orbach counterbalances this by examining the connections between principal figures as the Nazis took hold of German society. Initially, defiance developed among conservative iconoclasts from the military and the nobility. The author uses organizational theory to explore how resistance to totalitarianism moved from such secretive “cliques” to broader networks, potent but more vulnerable. Of these early groups, “most…were never involved in opposition to the Nazi regime, but a tiny portion went through a process of revolutionary mutation in the opening months of 1938.” A planned coup nearly occurred that year, during Hitler’s aggression against Czechoslovakia, but it fizzled out following appeasement. As one plotter noted, “never, since 1933, was there such a good chance to free Germany and the world.” Amazingly, a disgruntled lone wolf nearly killed Hitler the following year, an event that stands in ironic contrast to the increasingly labyrinthine networks. Orbach tracks the conspiracy’s rise and fall over several years; some participants were motivated by spiraling defeats on the eastern front, others through witnessing genocidal acts. The charismatic Claus von Stauffenberg linked the military, bureaucratic, and civilian cliques into a “wheel conspiracy”; unfortunately, its efficiency permitted the Nazis to punish most plotters following his failed bombing of Hitler’s hideaway. Orbach is thoughtful and careful in portraying a rebellion against evil that ended “honorably, perhaps, but in utter failure.”
A dense but gripping look at a historical counternarrative that remains relevant and disturbing.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-71443-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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