A journalist for Toronto's Globe and Mail details the continuing, wretched story of Swiss collusion, as financiers and dealers in stolen goods, with Nazi Germany. The story isn't simple, and the culpability extends far beyond Swiss bankers. For instance, Vincent notes that a US intelligence report from 1945 suggested that even the International Committee of the Red Cross, with headquarters in Switzerland, smuggled ``Nazi assets and valuables across Europe in diplomatic pouches.'' A number of Swiss firms may also have worked closely (and profitably) with the Nazis. While it was known in official circles that Switzerland flagrantly abused its neutrality, its complicity was only lightly considered by the Allied victors, largely because of pragmatic realpolitik. Although Swiss banks, throughout the war, paid Germany needed foreign currency for gold bullion usurped from the central banks of conquered countries and for bars refined from the gold gathered from the ring fingers and teeth of millions of slaughtered Jews, they were not pursued by any international courts. Secret accounts established by beleaguered Jews before they disappeared were ignored, too. An amount approaching $6 billion (in current dollars) may have been involved. Only under intense international pressure, generated at first by the World Jewish Congress, have the Swiss begun, reluctantly, truculently, to open their bank records for review. Vincent provides a thorough summary of what is known about Swiss actions during and since the war, and to humanize the issue, draws on a number of interviews with individuals attempting to find out about family accounts, and especially on the efforts of the surviving descendants of Abraham Hammersmith, a Viennese textile exporter, to reclaim their past. The history of the Hammersmith family, many of whom died in the Holocaust, is a kind of record in miniature of Jewish suffering and Swiss mendacity. A clear, angry, important (though interim) work that treats significant matters with clarity and intelligence. (8 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-15425-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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