A fascinating look into the thoughts of a historian whose career deserves to be revived.
A collection of letters written by a prominent but largely forgotten historian during the World War II era.
Larson, a historian who worked for the U.S. Defense Department, is uniquely qualified to edit an assemblage of letters written by Prince Hubertus Z. Löwenstein: the correspondence in question is addressed to him. (The subtitle is somewhat confusing: Hans Christian is a nickname Löwenstein bestowed upon Larson, as is helpfully explained in a foreword written by Löwenstein’s daughter, Margarete von Schwarzkopf.) Larson met Löwenstein when, in 1942, he entered Hamline University in Minnesota, where Löwenstein—a German exile forced to decamp for the U.S. due to his anti-Nazi convictions—was a lecturer at the time. The letters are arranged chronologically, from 1942 until 1947, and while they cover a wide range of topics, they are understandably dominated by the specter of Hitler’s designs on European domination, the prosecution of the war, and the complex peace that followed. Löwenstein’s letters are often driven by an “anxiety over the fate of the Occident,” but they are not cynical; he hoped for a renewed, even further consolidated Europe to rise from the detritus of the war’s destruction. His missives are also filled with philosophical insight that’s sometimes delightfully idiosyncratic: “to hell with Aristotle, this source of all evils in the human mind!!!” He tells Larson, in 1945, that he’s planning a book on Hegel that rescues his work from its appropriation by Marxists. Supplementing the letters is intermittent commentary by Larson himself, who provides colorful historical context and makes a case for taking Löwenstein seriously as a prescient critic of authoritarian government in all its guises. Sometimes Larson’s curation seems odd: a few of the letters are more personal than political or philosophical, seeming a bit out of place. The collection will, of course, largely be of interest to professional scholars, but it could also be fruitfully read by any reader with a deep interest in Europe during a perilous time, as interpreted by an unusually incisive mind.
A fascinating look into the thoughts of a historian whose career deserves to be revived.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502791672
Page Count: 738
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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