Mendes’s heroism is certainly worth rediscovering, but this is more eulogy than biography.
A French journalist narrates the little-known story of a Portuguese consul in France who, in 1940, gave visas to more than 10,000 Jews and Gentiles fleeing the Nazi invasion.
Aristide de Sousa Mendes could stand as proof of the cynical truism that no good deed goes unpunished. A career diplomat, Mendes served as Portuguese consul in Bordeaux during WWII. Although historians have routinely praised the Portuguese government’s humane actions during the course of the war (assuming that the flood of refugees admitted into Portugal after the French defeat reflected official policy), the fact was that Antonio Salazar, Portugal’s dictator, did not disapprove of Hitler and didn’t want the refugees. In 1939 he instructed Portuguese diplomats to grant visas only to select individuals approved by him. All obeyed except Mendes, who had 25 years of diplomatic service, 14 children, large debts, and no personal objections to the Salazar regime. When, in May 1940, the trickle of refugees became a flood, he kept his consulate open day and night, recruiting reluctant associates to help write the visas. His infuriated superiors repeatedly complained and ordered him to stop, but he continued. At the end of June, they stripped Mendes of authority and ordered him home. Dismissed from the service, he spent the remaining decade of his life in increasing poverty, pleading in vain for reinstatement. The author does not hide his admiration for Mendes and works hard to document the consul’s heroic deeds and the Portuguese government’s contemptible indifference—but, although he offers some speculation on Mendes’s motives, he never really attempts to explain why the consul felt driven to act as he did. The account takes on a somewhat two-dimensional aspect as a result.
Mendes’s heroism is certainly worth rediscovering, but this is more eulogy than biography.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0848-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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