A valuable contribution to world history as viewed from a non–Anglo-American perspective.
An appropriately vast history of the years between World War I and World War II, after which the “bipolar world” of today came into being.
German historian Winkler (Germany: The Long Road West: Volume 2: 1933-1990, 2007, etc.), an emeritus professor at the renowned Humboldt University, takes the conventional view that the wartime reparations demanded of Germany by the victorious Allies after WWI were the first step on the road to ruin that was Nazism. He is unconventional in allowing that Germany deserved some punishment, especially given the war crimes German soldiers committed that were never adequately adjudicated. Readers are more than 200 pages into the account before encountering Winkler’s reckoning that only six war-crimes trials were ever held, with the result that “Germany’s war crimes went unpunished.” By this time, we have already learned that Germany was the perpetrator of “the first systematic genocide of the twentieth century” which put German diplomats in a rather uncomfortable position when confronting the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, which the author unhesitatingly numbers at 1.5 million. Though his narrative is full of central events, Winkler’s book is particularly valuable in recounting lesser-known details, colonial sideshows, and events at the fringes of Europe: the terrible conflict between Greeks and Turks in the early 1920s, which almost drew Britain into another shooting war, and the rise of Arab nationalism in the anti-colonial struggles in North Africa against France and Spain. Winkler also finds invigorating connections: Woodrow Wilson may have been maneuvered out of a role in settling the European peace, but Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed a modicum of revenge when he delinked the dollar from the world economy in 1933, signaling that “the United States had no intention of allowing other nations to shackle its movements in terms of currency.” Though some of the author’s arguments are curious, as when he links German post–World War II guilt to Protestant ideas of “inherent sinfulness,” none are entirely fruitless.
A valuable contribution to world history as viewed from a non–Anglo-American perspective.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-20489-6
Page Count: 1016
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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