An insightful reminder that people can be unaware of the outside world until it’s too late.
Creeping dread seeps through these fictional memories of German boyhood during the horror of Hitler’s rise to power, WWII and Russian occupation.
Through a young boy’s eyes, debut novelist Schroeder vividly portrays daily life in a village where the weather and crops are the main concerns. The boy, whose age is never disclosed, lives with his parents, and his pleasant life is untouched by politics; visits to see grandparents and swimming in the lake are the highlights of his life. Gradually, however, the Nazis and their march to war begin to intrude. At first, everyone believes the propaganda that the country is merely defending itself from attacks by surrounding states, and life goes on much as before, with only the occasional disruption. Even the outbreak of war fails to disrupt complacency, but soon, men are swept into the Wehrmacht, women are widowed, food becomes scarce, and the Russian Front turns placid souls into savages. One villager deserts the army and has no qualms about shooting civilians to stay alive. Even the boy’s aging father, a railroad clerk, is shoved into uniform to perpetuate the hopeless mission. There’s a brief period of hope when the Americans and British arrive, but they hand over control to the Russians, and a new grim existence takes hold. Yet the boy’s mother never gives up struggling for a better life for her son. Schroeder punctuates each chapter with a political and military timeline of the period—an effective way of placing events in context. The underlying message commendably points out humanity’s capacity for criminal folly, where selfish desires blot out compassion for fellow beings. But Schroeder makes a curious assertion about what Hitler could have done instead of committing suicide—among his supposed options: “He could have fled to any Jew-hating country and been welcomed with open arms as a hero”—that’s at odds with the views of many historians.
An insightful reminder that people can be unaware of the outside world until it’s too late.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2012
ISBN: 9781475291339
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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