by Israel Gutman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 19, 1994
A richly documented short history of the Warsaw Ghetto by Gutman (History/Hebrew University), who is a death-camp survivor and the director of the research center at Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial. There are many well-chosen citations from diaries, underground papers, and other rare documents—along with several maps and photographs (some previously unpublished). The title is the book's major flaw, as if the publisher grasped for the few moments of heroic resistance in an account dominated by hopeless victimization. Gutman himself criticizes the Israelis for giving disproportionate play to armed revolt when commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto. The shots heard 'round the occupied world are first fired more than halfway through the book. The harrowing entries and statistics describing life in the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of the typhus traps carefully planned by the Nazis, make clear that resistance was impeded by the Germans' use of Jewish police (often assimilated or converted Jews) and by the deadening effects of slow starvation and strategically strewn crumbs of hope (``those who cooperate and work will survive''). Gutman moves from the painful details to the larger, ideological picture, such as Himmler exhorting his troops to battle the Soviets, aka the ``Jewish'' Bolsheviks, for the Aryan world ``as we have conceived it: beautiful, decent, socially equal.'' Only after the ghetto is largely depleted from evacuations to the death camps do we hear poet and partisan Abba Kovner ring out with ``Arise! Arise with your last breath!'' The final weeks of armed struggle are brought to life with excerpts from dismayed German generals (referring to Jews as the ``enemy''), rival Jewish militias, and distantly admiring Poles. As the index and bibliography indicate, one would have to read dozens of German, Jewish, and Polish accounts to get what Gutman has gleaned for us here. An essential one-volume read for the layman or undergraduate.
Pub Date: April 19, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-60199-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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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