A welcome reassessment of a monumental trial.
Lipstadt (Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies/Emory Univ.; History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving, 2005, etc.) revisits the historic trial of the man in the glass booth.
Kidnapped in Buenos Aires, where he was working at a Mercedes-Benz assembly plant, the high-ranking Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was tried and sentenced to death by an Israeli court in 1961 for his role in the Jewish genocide. In this authoritative book, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the trial, the author offers a concise account of the courtroom drama, from the prosecutor’s opening statement (“With me in this place and at this hour, stand six million accusers”) to the testimony of survivors about mass shootings and deportations to death camps. Despite incriminating evidence, Eichmann showed no remorse for his actions, insisted he was following orders and gave incomprehensible speeches that remain maddening to anyone reading the transcripts today. Many observers found the defendant dull—an “automaton…who failed to understand that what he had done was wrong” according to political theorist Hannah Arendt, who covered the trial for the New Yorker. Others, writes Lipstadt, discerned Eichmann’s passion and rage. Faulting Arendt’s controversial view of Eichmann as a bureaucrat who showed no “fanatical anti-Semitism” and exemplified “the banality of evil,” Lipstadt argues that a deep-seated Jewish hatred animates both perpetrators and deniers of the Holocaust. She notes that Arendt—whose perspective informs the thinking of many—treated historical data haphazardly and refused to acknowledge anti-Semitism’s fundamental role in the Holocaust. The author draws nicely on her experiences as defendant in a 2000 libel suit brought against her by author David Irving, whom she had described as a leading Holocaust denier. Lipstadt writes that intense worldwide coverage of the Eichmann trial brought the term “Holocaust” into the lexicon for the first time, and greatly accelerated the growth of scholarly study of the Final Solution.
A welcome reassessment of a monumental trial.Pub Date: March 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4260-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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