A sobering, valuable resource for future historians.
A grim tale of one man’s dedication to a legal and moral cause and a shocking exposé of the widespread indifference and even antagonism that he has encountered.
Historian Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, describes himself as “one-third detective, one-third historian and one-third political lobbyist, all of which combine to constitute a twenty-first-century Nazi hunter.” A scholar of the Holocaust, he began doing research for the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which had been set up in 1979 to take legal action against Nazi war criminals living in America. During his time with the OSI, Zuroff learned of the major role played by collaborators in Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, Belarus and Croatia, many of whom had escaped notice when they fled to the United States, Canada, Australia and Britain. Zuroff, who later joined the Wiesenthal Center, details his determined and often futile efforts to convince the governments in what he refers to as “Anglo-Saxon democracies” to prosecute Nazi war criminals. He reports that political will was lacking and legal actions were minimal. Political changes in eastern Europe following the breakup of the Soviet Union then led him to turn his attention to this region with the additional aims of fighting local anti-Semitism and promoting the accuracy of Holocaust accounts. The indifference he had met earlier was now combined with open antagonism, including death threats. With the financial aid of an American, Aryeh Rubin, in 2002 Zuroff launched Operation Last Chance, a campaign that offered rewards of $10,000 to anyone supplying information leading to the conviction and punishment of a Holocaust perpetrator. Acknowledging that time is no longer on his side, the author describes his dogged pursuit of those whose names the campaign has brought to his attention. That Zuroff continues his efforts is a tribute to his determination to ensure that “the Holocaust will neither be forgotten, nor ignored, nor denied, nor distorted and that the historical record of its crimes that we leave to future generations will be as accurate as humanely possible.”
A sobering, valuable resource for future historians.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-61730-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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 Yorkerstaff 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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