Worth a look for those on a hunt for as much information on everyday WWII Germany as possible, but as a work of prose, the...
A short story collection about German life during World War II.
Roegner introduces his collection in an academic manner, creating the notion that his book is an account of real-life details as experienced by ordinary Germans during WWII; “These people were not absorbed in ideology,” he writes. “This book is a collection of their stories…stories based on memoirs and actual people.” From this description the reader comes to expect anecdotes, but Roegner's reconstruction of the stories lessens their impact due to the author’s flat tone and lack of narrative flair. The text contains a significant amount of factual, historical content but presents this content without the aid of a strong authorial voice, frequently telling the reader of the characters’ experiences rather than dramatizing them within the various narratives and breathing life into history. Despite the drab presentation, however, Roegner’s book is useful in that it offers missing links of perspective; “These stories should help share with an English-speaking audience some of the output of recent, grass-roots efforts by German families and small town institutions to piece together the bits and pieces of their often silent past,” he writes. And the book certainly achieves that. It is a worthwhile read in as far as it contains points of information that give insight, especially to Americans of German descent searching for clues to their past. “Gerta [thought] back to her endless hours in the bakery or the bunker in her early teens,” Roegner writes during a dance club flirtation between a German and a Swede. Details like this open a window onto the era, and perspectives from those such as a lonely post-war secretary or an elderly survivor provoke the reader’s curiosity. Unfortunately, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the work would have read better as nonfiction, as Roegner’s style is dry and sedate.
Worth a look for those on a hunt for as much information on everyday WWII Germany as possible, but as a work of prose, the stories fall flat.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466242494
Page Count: 131
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2011
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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