In his memoirs, prominent musicologist and stage director Wagner unveils the anti-Semitic sentiment that prevailed in his family ever since his illustrious great-grandfather, composer Richard Wagner, expressed his pathological Jew-hatred in his 1850 essay “Jews in Music.” Born shortly after WWII into an influential family who singlehandedly managed the Bayreuth Wagner Festival, Gottfired began investigating German-Jewish relations and his family’s Nazi past from an early age. This interest eventually made him an outcast among his relatives. Richard Wagner anticipated Hitler’s Final Solution when he called for the restoration of the German Aryan race, pure of degenerative Jewish blood. Drawing on family letters and photographs, Gottfried uncovers his grandmother’s close relationship with Hitler: Winifred was proud to have supplied an incarcerated Hitler with the paper on which he wrote Mein Kampf. Although she declined his marriage proposal, she remained the FÅhrer’s intimate friend and a dedicated Nazi Party member. As for Hitler, he found Wagner’s chauvinistic ideas inspiring and his music a perfect background for military parades. We read precious little about Richard Wagner and the origins of his ideological stance, as the book mainly details the author’s interaction with his family legacy. Gottfried takes us through a confrontation with his authoritative father, academic and family research, job searches, two marriages, and the adoption of a Romanian orphan. Gottfried’s accomplishments include a doctoral thesis on Jewish-German composer Kurt Weill, whose works were condemned in Nazi Germany, opera productions in Europe and Turkey, and worldwide lectures on the Wagners. In the 1980s, his career took an odd twist when he tried his hand in banking. Thanks in large part to Gottfried’s lecture tour in Israel, Richard Wagner’s once-taboo music was played for the first time on Israeli radio in 1990. A disturbing examination of the great composer’s legacy that sheds new light on a powerful clan and the persistence of Nazi ideology in postwar Germany.
Pub Date: May 26, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-19957-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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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