A valuable contribution to the ever-growing library on Hitler and National Socialism. Davidson, president emeritus of the Conference on European History and a former president of the Foundation for Foreign Affairs, picks up where his previous work, The Making of Adolf Hitler (1977), left off. From Hitler's first moves hours after being sworn in as chancellor on January 30, 1933, until the final GîtterdÑmmerung in the Berlin bunker, Davidson presents a clearly written and cohesive narrative. The focus here is mostly on political and diplomatic history, and some may lament the absence of information on economic and social conditions under the Third Reich. The title is somewhat misleading, since almost 400 pages are devoted to Hitler's unbroken string of successes, from the moment when he gained power until the tide of war finally began to turn against the Germans. In fact, the reader might be astounded by the combination of skill and luck that accompanied Hitler both before and during the war. It was only after the failure to subdue England, when Hitler turned his armies toward the Soviet Union, that his fortunes began to decline. Davidson's study of diplomacy in the 1930s persuasively demonstrates that French and British politicians and diplomats were totally at a loss when dealing with Hitler. Curiously, there is little discussion concerning anti- Semitism, racism, or the Holocaust; since it has been argued that these ideas and events represent the very heart of the Nazi ideology, this is a serious shortcoming, even if the work is concerned primarily with diplomatic and political history, for what is more ``political'' than genocide? A student unfamiliar with the past might conclude that euthanasia, political terror, the glorification of war, and the Holocaust were merely sidelines to the story. Most of what is here is not new, yet it is presented in a manner that will benefit specialists; for students and others, the book offers only one facet of the larger picture. (50 illustrations, not seen.)
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8262-1045-7
Page Count: 536
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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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