Vigorous—even abrasive—reporting illuminates yet another dismal page of history’s darkest book. (4 b&w illustrations)
A contributing editor for the Nation assesses the unsuccessful libel action brought by historian David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt (and Penguin, her publisher) for characterizing him as a Holocaust-denier in her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust.
Guttenplan did his homework. Not only did he sit through the three-month trial (January 11 through April 11, 2000), he also read the thousands of pages of trial exhibits, the historical works written by the principals and witnesses, and myriads of other publications relating to the Holocaust. Even better: He interviewed the trial judge, as well as both Irving and Lipstadt. The result is the most informed, disinterested account of this significant proceeding as we are likely to get. Irving filed suit in July 1996 in England. This was a smart move, for English libel laws required Lipstadt to prove that what she had said was true; in the US, Irving would have had to demonstrate that her charges were not only false but intentionally so. Guttenplan raises interesting questions about historical methods and evidence. What is history? How reliable are witnesses? And documents? (The author regrets that the only witnesses were historians, but he knows why: the sometimes inaccurate memories of Holocaust survivors would have aided the able Irving, who served as his own counsel.) Guttenplan adopts a fairly traditional, chronological approach—he digresses principally to offer snapshot biographies of Irving and Lipstadt, to dismantle the “science” of the pathetic Fred Leuchter (subject of Errol Morris’s film Mr. Death) and to take potshots at Daniel Goldhagen (whose Hitler’s Willing Executioners fares poorly in these pages). Guttenplan is not easy on anyone. He has little respect for Lipstadt’s scholarship and moral courage; he characterizes Irving as fundamentally racist, dishonest and dangerous; sometimes he finds witnesses ineffective, attorneys boring, the judge too indulgent. He suggests that Jews hurt their own cause when they insist on the uniqueness of the Holocaust. But the author’s sharpness has the great virtue of being able to cut through cant and balderdash.
Vigorous—even abrasive—reporting illuminates yet another dismal page of history’s darkest book. (4 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-02044-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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