by Flint Whitlock ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2005
A worthy effort, though readers will want to turn to Cohen’s book first.
A grunt’s-eye view of a terrible chapter in the last months of WWII: the enslavement of captured GIs, Jews and gentiles alike, to serve the dying Reich.
Inspired by Charles Guggenheim’s 2003 PBS documentary on the Berga concentration camp, military historian Whitlock offers an account enriched by the voices of many of the GIs who, captured at the Battle of the Bulge, were spirited away to work in the mines of southeastern Germany. Unfortunately for Whitlock, though, Guggenheim’s documentary also nourished Roger Cohen’s companion volume, Soldiers and Slaves (p. 96), which is far better on the big-picture complexities of religion, politics and psychology that the soldiers’ ordeal involved and is much better written to boot. Still, Whitlock acquits himself reasonably well, and though he slips into ill-advised tough-guyisms (“A Soviet operation known as Bagration . . . was a kick in the German ass. On 15 August, another Allied landing . . . was a knife in the gut. . . .”), he provides useful backstory on the Battle of the Bulge and how the GIs were captured in the first place. The best parts here, though, are straight from the mouths of the inmates. One remembers, for instance, that when the Americans objected to the segregation of Jewish soldiers, a German came back with: Well, after all, don’t you “separate blacks from whites in [your] own army?” Another, a Catholic, recounts that the non-Jews among the contingent of GIs sent into slavery could not understand how he had been picked for the duty. “We all had one thing in common, though,” he concludes, “we were all ‘undesirable.’ ” A third recalls that the slaves of Berga worked on rations of 400 to 600 calories a day—and, as if that were not bad enough, had to deal with brutal guards. “There were no gas chambers in Berga,” one German Jew who had survived Auschwitz and then been moved there noted, “but there were other killings.”
A worthy effort, though readers will want to turn to Cohen’s book first.Pub Date: April 30, 2005
ISBN: 0-8133-4288-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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