Richly complex, if often painful.
Life in the Reich capital.
Buruma, professor at Bard College and author of Year Zero: A History of 1945 (2013), has a personal interest in the subject of his latest book: His father spent two years in Berlin, compelled to join 400,000 foreign factory workers, poorly fed and housed but paid a small salary. Buruma draws on an abundant source of material, including letters and diaries, enriching these with interviews with wartime eyewitnesses, now in their 90s. Berlin was never a hotbed of Nazi enthusiasm, and Buruma describes many Berliners, especially artists, professionals, and the aristocracy who held a low opinion of them. Hitler’s invasions of Poland and France were mostly considered good news in Berlin. Rationing was tedious, but for the war’s first two years, provided one wasn’t Jewish, it was possible to imagine that life in Berlin was normal. By the fall of 1942, with no sign of victory in Russia and Allied bombings increasing, the quality of life declined relentlessly—although suffering in Berlin never matched that inflicted on conquered people in Eastern Europe. Jews, of course, suffered a worse fate. The avalanche of the Nazis’ antisemitic abuse, poured out since 1933, persuaded most Germans that Jews were at least “a problem.” Half of Berlin’s 160,000 Jews had left by 1939. The remainder had been ejected from jobs, schools, and homes, crammed into slum ghettoes, and forbidden to buy clothes, vehicles, and even pets. Mass deportation began in 1941. Buruma describes heroic Berliners who sheltered Jews, despite the terrible danger, but heroism is rare, and most Germans, even sympathizers, refused. Fewer than 2,000 remained in 1945.
Richly complex, if often painful.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593654347
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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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