by Heini Gruffudd ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 14, 2014
A family’s story that is by turns crushing and uplifting.
A multilayered, moving literary memoir of a half-Jewish family torn apart during the Nazi era, with one branch ultimately relocating to Wales. The book was named the 2013 Welsh Book of the Year.
Gruffudd, active in Welsh-language education, is the son of a half-Jewish German woman, Kate Bosse-Griffiths, who came to Britain to study when she was dismissed for racial reasons from her position at a museum in Berlin in 1936. In Wittenberg, the seat of Martin Luther’s protests against the Catholic Church in the 16th century, the Bosse family had a successful distillery. In 1906, son Paul Bosse, a doctor, married Kaethe Levin, from a Jewish solicitor’s family that converted to Christianity in 1896 and took the name Ledien. With the rise of the Nazis, however, the conversion did not erase the Jewish stigma for Kaethe, her family and children. Despite Paul’s sterling credentials as director of the local clinic and his selection as a member of the medical team serving the German athletes in the 1936 Olympics, he was pressured to divorce his Jewish wife (he would not) and generally persecuted in the anti-Semitism that reigned in Wittenberg. (Gruffudd reminds us that Luther’s anti-Semitic tracts were amply employed in Nazi propaganda.) Kaethe was transported to a concentration camp in late 1944 and died shortly thereafter. In a horrible parallel, her sister, Eva, married to a rising Nazi officer, hanged herself in 1938 when it became apparent the only hope for her family’s survival was her death. Gruffudd tracks his mother’s extraordinary good fortune in finding positions as assistant to classicist Sir D’Arcy Thompson at St. Andrews, Scotland, and, later, as a research scholar at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford just before the war broke out. Kate married a Welshman and valiantly took up the cause of preserving the Welsh language.
A family’s story that is by turns crushing and uplifting.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84771-817-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Y Lolfa/Dufour
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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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