by Joel F. Harrington ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2013
An accessible, even inviting portrait of the professional killer, despite the gruesome detail.
A sympathetic revelation of the surprisingly poignant inner life of a pious Lutheran executioner.
A historian of early modern German history at Vanderbilt, Harrington (The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany, 2009) has delved at length into a personal journal kept over a remarkable 45-year career by the executioner of Nuremberg, Frantz Schmidt; the journal reveals that he was keeping it for very public reasons. Schmidt began the journal at age 19 in 1573, when he was just an apprentice to his father, the executioner of Bamberg. After a stint as a journeyman, Schmidt attained the status of master by age 24 and procured a plum job in the thriving industry town of Nuremberg, where he plied his trade with exemplary dignity for the next 40 years, recording some 394 deaths and countless acts of flogging and torture. Some of the entries offer more detail than others, but overall, Schmidt shows he was a willing executioner, even a passionate one, in terms of his righteous sense of administering due punishment in the face of senseless, random injustice. He was also an abstemious, disciplined professional who brought rigorous standards to a trade notorious for its violence and instability. Moreover, Harrington reveals some subtle yet telling details in the journal, attesting to the scholar’s expertise in German and his doggedness in going back to Schmidt’s original manuscript rather than relying on later, edited versions. Despite its authorial diffidence, “an evolving self-identity became ever more pronounced,” as Schmidt shows his obsession with social standing and a sense of righting his own familial injustice. What he wanted was what everyone strove for: a better life for his children. A whole teeming world of Reformation Germany comes alive in this well-handled historical reconstruction.
An accessible, even inviting portrait of the professional killer, despite the gruesome detail.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8090-4992-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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