A sturdy contribution to Cold War history.
A history of “a uniquely squalid, violent—and, as we now know, ultimately futile—episode in the post-war world.”
Between August 13, 1961, when the Berlin Wall went up, and November 9, 1989, when it came crashing down, 86 people died as a direct result of violence there. The count may include a couple of dozen more, depending on the criteria used, but it is clear that the Wall took fewer lives than one might suppose. Nonetheless, it stood as a powerful symbol of the divide between East and West, and, moreover, as Nikita Khrushchev understood, a repudiation of Sovietism. “The Wall,” writes British novelist and historian Taylor (Dresden, 2004, etc.), “was in the long run a propaganda catastrophe for the East. Every day it existed, it screamed aloud one simple, damning statement: in Berlin we Communists stood in direct competition with capitalism, and we lost.” Nonetheless, East Germany’s leaders had reason to want to impede the flow of traffic into encircled West Berlin, since the most talented, productive members of East German society were defecting to the West in record numbers even before Josef Stalin died. It was Stalin who authorized Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker to make a fortress of the frontier between the two Germanys, and Moscow that allowed their regime to erect the wall in the first place, even though Khrushchev “felt it was dangerous to give Ulbricht total control over access to Berlin.” In a legalistic turn, the East Germans initially closed traffic only to their fellow citizens passing through the Soviet sector, so that passage from West to East was theoretically permitted; but in the dangerous war of words that followed the construction of the Wall (built on a Sunday, no less, when workers would be resting), the barrier became permanent, heavily fortified and impassable, “a thing for which the term ‘Wall’ was wholly inadequate.”
A sturdy contribution to Cold War history.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-078613-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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