A modest but moving addition to the historical literature surrounding the Shoah.
Istanbul-based journalists Frantz and Collins bring to light a forgotten incident in WWII shameful for Allies and Axis alike.
With its long history of anti-Semitism, Romania made a willing partner in Hitler’s war against the Jews of Europe—so willing, in fact, that Hitler feared that Romania might emerge as “a bastion for fascists who were even more brutal than his own troops.” For the country’s Jews, this meant endless persecution, though some of the wealthier ones were able to bribe their tormentors to leave them alone and even to permit their escape through such vehicles as the Struma, a worn-out ship that in December 1941 took some 800 Jewish refugees from the Black Sea port of Constanta with a view to landing in British-controlled Palestine. There the plot thickens, for according to the authors (Celebration, U.S.A., 1999, etc.), the British had no interest in admitting more Jews into the territory; foreign secretary Anthony Eden even remarked to an underling, “If we must have preferences, let me murmur in your ear that I prefer Arabs to Jews,” and his subordinates responded in kind. Forbidden landing, the Struma was interned in an Istanbul harbor for two months, then expelled from Turkish waters and sunk by a Soviet submarine; through good investigative work, Frantz and Collins produce evidence that Josef Stalin had ordered the sinking of all nonbelligerent shipping in the open waters of the Black Sea, although they cannot say why. All but one of the Struma’s passengers and crews died. The authors tell this ugly story competently, if without much flair; their narrative is strangely flat for so dramatic an incident. Nonetheless, they’re to be commended for producing one more bit of proof that none of the major powers cared much about the fate of Europe’s Jews during the Nazi era.
A modest but moving addition to the historical literature surrounding the Shoah.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-621262-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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