A small book, but powerful all out of proportion to its size in exposing a shameful history.
Mr. Hitler, meet Justice Holmes.
Anyone pondering the results of the recent presidential election will detect the existence of at least two Americas. So did the Nazis. As Yale Law School professor Whitman (The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era, 2016, etc.) observes, the Third Reich readily found plenty of precedents for their complex system of race-based law in American legal history, but they were also puzzled by “the strength of the liberal countercurrent in a country with so much openly and unapologetically sanctioned racism.” By Whitman’s account, the Nazis were sometimes even less heavy-handed on the legal front than the architects of Jim Crow—and, he writes, it must be remembered that racist laws spread far beyond the South. Nazi jurists even found some American laws too harsh, such as the “one-drop” rule of defining whether one were “Negro.” As his argument builds, the author capably defends the assertion that the U.S. was not just a racist power throughout much of its history, but the pre-eminent racist power in the world, one that built elaborate classification schemes in the service of denying minorities and colonized persons full civil rights. Granted that the Germans were more thorough in their application: Whitman observes that whereas Germany sought to impose state machinery on race laws in order to avoid turning legal matters over to the mob, “the United States by contrast remained faithful to lynch justice.” Whitman is careful to avoid the minefields of cause and effect: there has been only one real Hitler, after all, and only one Holocaust of the technocratic sort that he set in motion. Still, the author is clear that we should be alarmed and chastened by the fact that the Nazis found so much to emulate in American jurisprudence. “The image of America as seen through Nazi eyes in the early 1930s is not the image we cherish,” he writes, “but it is hardly unrecognizable.”
A small book, but powerful all out of proportion to its size in exposing a shameful history.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-691-17242-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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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