Ghastly history, well told.
The painful details.
Third Reich scholar McDonough, author of The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler’s Secret Police, completes his four-volume history of Germany from 1918 to 1945 with this year-by-year narrative of the Holocaust. When the Nazis took power in 1933, 525,000 native-born Jews lived in Germany, numbering 0.76% of the population. Most Germans had little contact with Jews and didn’t participate in the nationwide wave of assault, vandalism, and humiliation by Nazi activists that followed. International outrage over the attacks was dismissed by Nazi officials who maintained that Jews controlled the media. Violence and anti-Jewish laws began immediately but became genocidal only after war began. Ninety-five percent of all Jewish murders occurred after Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. Many were murdered in extermination camps, of course, but many also died of starvation, disease, or overwork or were shot in face-to-face massacres. McDonough excels in research, and he delivers a steady stream of facts on anti-Jewish legislation, increasingly violent persecution, planning, construction, and operation of major camps, biographies of staff and victims, and consequences, if any. Some high- and low-level Nazis involved in the Holocaust were punished after the war; most weren’t. About 80% of Jews under Nazi control were murdered. Most Germans looked the other way. Most citizens of the democracies disapproved of Nazi mistreatment but refused to help. Although happy to welcome Albert Einstein and other celebrities, most Americans opposed accepting refugees who were fleeing Nazism. Allied leaders learned of the mass murders in 1942, but none took action. Although “Nazi” remains a reviled word everywhere, the 21st century has seen an embrace of leaders who owe their success to the belief that outsiders are “poisoning” their nations. McDonough reminds readers that Hitler’s policy during the 1930s was not to murder Jews but to deport them.
Ghastly history, well told.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781035912483
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Apollo/Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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