A thorough study of a parlous episode in European history.
The ardent quest for peace sometimes leads to war. So discovered Neville Chamberlain and his political allies in 1938, following their earnest negotiations to avoid war with Adolf Hitler.
Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, should have known that something was up when propagandist Joseph Goebbels complained to him that British journalists in Berlin weren’t showing the Nazi regime enough love. Halifax, writes historian Faber (Speaking for England, 2005), observed that the correspondents had been there for years and had not changed. “We did not complain in the past because Germany was not rearmed,” said Goebbels. “We complain now because we are strong enough to do so.” Throughout 1938, Hitler and company would indeed bluster and complain, particularly that ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia were being mistreated. Sickened by the bloodletting 20 years earlier, the British electorate seemed inclined to let Hitler take what he wished as long as he kept the peace with them. Certainly Chamberlain seemed desperate to maintain peace at nearly any price, while liberals such as Clement Attlee counseled conciliation. Only Winston Churchill was mistrustful enough of Hitler to reject the notion that the Germans would stop once they added the Sudetenland to their holdings. Faber’s account of the negotiations has its airless moments, mainly because the proceedings themselves had a certain stop-and-start quality to them. Comic relief, such as it is, largely comes in the person of Benito Mussolini, who, Faber makes clear, resented playing second fiddle to the German leader to the north. Hitler was a master at spouting rhetoric that marched to the brink of war and then withdrew to seemingly reasonable demands for “justice”—such as any politician might do, and into which ploy the British played, to their later disappointment.
A thorough study of a parlous episode in European history.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3233-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
HISTORY | MODERN | 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 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
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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