by Gad Beck & Frank Heibert & translated by Allison Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1999
Beck, director of Berlin’s Jewish Adult Education Center, recalls his youth and his work in the anti-Nazi resistance under most unusual circumstances. Beck was half of a pair of twins (with his sister Margot) born to an interfaith couple in Weimar Germany. Beck was one of those rare fortunate gay men who recognized his sexual orientation while still very young and who had a tolerant, loving, and supportive family who never for an instant were troubled by his lifestyle. He was equally lucky that his kin on the Christian side of the family felt the same toward their new Jewish relatives. Those facts are an inextricable element in his story of growing up Jewish in Nazi Germany. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Beck and his family found themselves, like other Jews, almost immediately stigmatized by law and separated forcibly from their non-Jewish friends and neighbors. After a lengthy series of humiliations, he was forced to leave his nondenominational school for a Jewish one. Beck is one of those quietly feisty types who are spurred by rejection into action; plunged into an entirely Jewish milieu, he quickly embraced the Zionist movement. Just as quickly, he embraced many of its male adherents, and the author is charmingly frank (but not explicit) about his sex life as well as his clandestine political activities. He would survive the war living as an “illegal” in Berlin, becoming a central figure in the underdocumented Zionist resistance that functioned despite the Nazis. Beck is a witty, chatty figure, and Heibert and Brown have done a splendid job of capturing and conveying his voice. The result is a readable and entertaining memoir of a terrible time. Beck is apparently at work on a sequel that takes him from the end of the war up to the present; it’s a book to look forward to.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-299-16500-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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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