Worth reading, but only with your willing suspension of disbelief fully engaged.
A strange foray into the history of the Third Reich that posits skullduggery and conspiracy in the matter of the SS leader’s celebrated suicide.
Himmler supposedly killed himself on May 23, 1945, after having been captured by British soldiers. There were two post-mortem examinations, both to establish proof of the cause of death (cyanide poisoning) and identity of the deceased and, in intelligence agent Kim Philby’s words, to “lay to rest the ghost of a live Himmler.” Nonsense, says forensic expert Thomas (The Murder of Adolf Hitler, 1996): the body pictured in the newsreels was not Himmler’s, but that of a lieutenant. What happened to the real article? Well, Thomas continues, British and American intelligence allowed him to slip underground as part of a complex deal that effectively granted him immunity from prosecution; Himmler went on to control the “Fourth Reich” (the Nazi regime in South American exile) while perhaps continuing to live in Germany. This argument, largely in the absence of evidence (the British government will not open its files on Himmler until 2045), is intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying. Somewhat better grounded is Thomas’s account of how Himmler, recognizing a couple of years before the fact that the Nazi cause was lost, prepared himself for a comfortable postwar future by stripping their treasury of millions on millions of Reichmarks, some of which he squirreled away in a secret Swiss bank that, among other things, had earlier invested funds from the British royal family in the Nazi war effort. The author adds that Himmler also attempted to better his position with the Allies, with whom he was secretly negotiating, by suspending the extermination of Jews for a time, though the “vacillating, panicky” Nazi later rescinded the order. These are large and controversial claims, and likely to be subject to intense scholarly scrutiny.
Worth reading, but only with your willing suspension of disbelief fully engaged.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28923-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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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