A fascinating look at ordinary life, terror, and persecution during the Holocaust.
Following on the heels of the groundbreaking scholarship of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and Christopher Browning, Johnson
(History/Central Michigan Univ.; Urbanization and Crime, not reviewed, etc.) takes a chilling look at what motivated the German people to pursue the course of the war and the Holocaust. Writing with a vigor and economy that belie his academic background, Johnson focuses his attention on three locales in the Rhineland region—Cologne, Krefeld, and Bergheim—sifting through layer upon layer of social mores and records to analyze the ways the general population reacted to and participated in Nazi atrocities. The boundaries of his study—established by cases tried in the Special Courts ordained in various cities (where political offenders were prosecuted) and Gestapo files (where many cases ended without an official prosecution)—are fleshed out by means of extensive interviews with Jewish survivors, German perpetrators, and other German citizens. Johnson argues that although the National Socialists routinely and consciously used terror as a tool against their enemies, not all objects of this terror were treated equally. The state’s fearsome, and fearsomely arbitrary, apparatus directed constant terror against some groups (Jews, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses), partial or intermittent terror against others (e.g., the clergy), and none at all against still others (party members and some lucky ordinary Germans). Johnson concludes that Nazi terror, though a factor, was by no means the sole factor in motivating the German people, many of them moved by anti-Semitism or the thirst for petty revenge, to participate in the Holocaust. The interviews, along with the author’s narrative skills, keep the text moving, making its 600 pages seem far shorter than its heft would suggest.
A fascinating look at ordinary life, terror, and persecution during the Holocaust.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-465-04906-0
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | 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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