Of much interest to students of modern history but also to those engaged in humanitarian relief efforts, refugee relocation,...
A political scientist turns fresh eyes on the problem of how European Jews responded to the Holocaust as it was unfolding.
Why did so many Jews not fight back? Past studies often look at “choiceless choices,” to which Finkel (Political Science and International Affairs/George Washington Univ.; co-editor: Coloured Revolutions and Authoritarian Reactions, 2013) adds, “yet choices they were nonetheless.” The author groups those choices into categories including evasion and cooperation and collaboration, in a gamut of responses ranging from outright collaboration to outright resistance. His study acquires layered depth with close analysis of three populations: the Jews of Minsk, Krakow, and Bialystok, among which (but also within which) there were significant variations, so much so that the author cautions that he is necessarily looking at “general behavioral patterns.” Among more culturally assimilated people, for instance, compliance was a norm simply because lawful people growing up in a supposedly lawful civilization could not believe what was happening to them. “There were also Jews…who initially believed that the German authorities had the legitimate right to issue orders,” he writes, “and that these orders ought to be obeyed by the subject population.” In Minsk, a place of pogroms, the population was more attuned to self-defense, with resistance shared by members of the working and middle classes alike. Finkel recognizes some of the difficulties attendant in all the choices: with evasion, for example, came the horrible fact for some Jews of being deported by Soviet authorities to the Nazis. He also ventures onto difficult and surely controversial ground when examining the behavior of collaborators. He closes this plainly written but inevitably somber account with pointed lessons for those who may find themselves persecuted, arguing, “it is possible to analyze and even to try to predict the behavior of people targeted by mass violence, and…doing so might increase our ability to help these people when violence unfolds.”
Of much interest to students of modern history but also to those engaged in humanitarian relief efforts, refugee relocation, and the like.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-691-17257-6
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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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