A marvelously concise effort, especially compelling as Angela Merkel is set to step down in 2021, leaving an uncertain...
A fast-moving encapsulation of German history focusing on the thesis that Prussia’s aggression was a short-lived anomaly in the big picture and not reflective of the true German spirit.
German-steeped British academic Hawes (Creative Writing/Oxford Brookes Univ.; Englanders and Huns: The Culture-Clash Which Led to the First World War, 2014, etc.) imparts plenty of useful information in this handy history for students looking to define a sometimes-inscrutable people with a tainted recent past. At the beginning, the author implores readers to “throw away a great deal of what we think we know about German history, and start afresh.” First, he reminds us that “Julius Caesar had invented the Germans,” that is the barbarians who lived east of the Rhine who differed greatly from the Romans, who, according to Tacitus, “had degenerated into a people made soft by vice and luxury, who merely groveled to their emperors.” Hence the beginning of the rather romantic character of Germans as wild and noble tribesmen on the frontiers. Hawes sees the birth of Germany as we know it with the partition of Charlemagne’s kingdom into West Frankish (France) and East Frankish (Germany); the practice of “electing” a king—Conrad in 911 C.E.—meant much of the subsequent German history was “one of a permanent battle between royalty and high nobility.” The author traces how the separation of west Germany from what was known as East Elbia occurred with the rise of the Junkers (“young lords”) and the increasing militarization of “muscled-up” Prussia under Frederick the Great, leading Prussia to its bellicose apotheosis from 1866 to 1945—“the great deformation,” asserts Hawes. The true liberal democratic spirit of the robust, enterprising Germans resides in the west, rather than the east, now again courting right-wing parties.
A marvelously concise effort, especially compelling as Angela Merkel is set to step down in 2021, leaving an uncertain vacuum in Europe.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61519-569-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The Experiment
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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 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
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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