An impressive and accessible analysis of 20th-century brutality.
An attempt to formulate a new ethics, based on human psychology, that will account for 20th-century atrocities and offer some realistic hope that they can be avoided in the future.
The mindless carnage of WWI, the totalitarian terror produced by Stalin, Mao Zedong, and the Khmer Rouge, and Hitler’s horrific drive for racial purity make reflections upon the 20th century an often-painful experience. Glover (What Sort of People Should There Be?, not reviewed) suggests looking beyond religious morality or the Enlightenment belief in a natural moral law for useful responses to such human depravity. He argues that a close study of human psychology provides clues about how normal people are led to willfully perpetrate evil on other human beings. The author believes that we are imbued with an innate respect and sympathy for other humans, which normally prevents cruelty between people. The identification of victims as subhuman (usually for ideological or racial reasons), however, manages to break down respect and sympathy—and almost guarantees an unleashing of human tendencies toward destruction and chaos. Glover supports his ideas effectively, with illustrations from most of the major conflicts of the century (including Vietnam, Hiroshima, Rwanda, WWI, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Stalinist Soviet Union, China’s Cultural Revolution, Cambodia, and Nazi Germany). He also suggests that atrocities can be avoided by building a future society that places greater emphasis upon the positive characteristics of sympathy and respect. He thus recreates morality from the ground up, with its intellectual basis now firmly grounded in modern psychology. The author presents his argument for this new psychological morality in accessible, incisive, and provocative prose.
An impressive and accessible analysis of 20th-century brutality.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-300-08700-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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