Most books about the Nuremberg trials have focused on the jurisprudential aspects of this unprecedented event. Persico (Casey, 1990; Edward R. Murrow, 1988; etc.) has chosen to write an overview that offers a picture of the comparatively underreported battles behind the judgments. Persico traces the history of the war crimes tribunal, from the waning days of the war, when Churchill was calling for drumhead court-martials and summary executions. Truman wanted a legal proceeding that would show the world that Nazi barbarism was the exception, not the rule, and would make an example of the most heinous perpetrators. But would the result be victors' justice or the real thing? Throughout the several months from the time the idea was hatched to the execution of sentence, there raged a series of behind-the-scenes struggles. Within the prosecution, there were turf wars over who would take the lead in examining witnesses, over which of the four participating powers—the US, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—would carry the most weight, and over genuine differences of opinion as to what kind of prosecution would be most effective. Among the defendants, there were numerous factions, with the supremely cynical anad evil Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering emerging as a dominant figure. Drawing on interviews with many participants who have never spoken of their experiences for publication, Persico delineates the personal clashes (Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the head of the US prosecution team, vs. former attorney general Francis Biddle, the US judge; a duel between the prison psychiatrist and psychologist over who would publish a book first), often at the expense of the courtroom action. Gradually the focus on the out-of-sight nastiness among the Allies becomes numbing and unpleasant, and the book is most lively when it shifts its attention back to the proceedings themselves. Nuremberg has an undeniable timeliness, especially in light of the new wave of Holocaust deniers. Persico writes well, despite occasionally drifting into melodrama, and the subject exerts its own fascination.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-84276-1
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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