For World War II buffs, an illuminating study of a depressing year.
A history of the lead-up to World War II mostly from the point of view of Britain and Germany.
Despite the title, British historian Taylor, author of Dresden (2004), The Berlin Wall (2007), and other works of European history, covers the period from the October 1938 Munich Agreement through Germany’s invasion of Poland the following September. At their most loathsome during that year, Hitler and the Nazis achieved triumph after triumph against a dithering Britain and France. Cutting away regularly, the author uses diaries, letters, newspapers, surveys, and police reports to deliver a vivid account of how ordinary Britons and Germans reacted. Excepting many intellectuals and a few government officials, the average non-Jewish German admired Hitler. There was almost no unemployment despite a standard of living far below that in Britain and France, and the incessant patriotic cheerleading pleased almost everyone. Germans did not, however, want war, as Taylor clearly demonstrates. They liked the idea of acquiring more territory, but when Hitler promised to invade Czechoslovakia if it did not give up the Sudetenland, the absence of national enthusiasm disgusted him. As a result, in the summer before the war, Hitler’s propaganda machine poured out so much fake news denouncing Polish malevolence, depravity, and atrocities against its German minority that most felt invasion was justified. However, Britons wanted war even less than Germans, so much so that the Munich Pact produced almost universal cheers throughout the nation—although “once the initial joy at the avoidance of war had worn off there was a slow but steady growth of buyer’s remorse among many members of the general public.” This sentiment peaked in March 1939 when German troops occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. At this point, most Britons agreed that Hitler was untrustworthy, and few objected when Britain and Poland signed a treaty that “guaranteed Polish independence.” That vague phrasing was easy to brush off, so Britain’s declaration of war after the invasion of Poland dismayed Germans from Hitler on down.
For World War II buffs, an illuminating study of a depressing year.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00679-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
HISTORY | MILITARY | 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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