A full-bodied, moving story of a battered populace that refused to be annihilated.
Canadian novelist den Hartog (Origin of Haloes, 2005, etc.) and her older sister Kasaboski re-create the Nazi occupation of their grandparents’ homeland.
The authors alternate their personal history of grandparents Cor (short for Cornelia) and Gerrit den Hartog, who lived in a small farming town outside of The Hague, with events in the life of the royal Dutch family. They focus specifically on Queen Wilhelmina, who fled to London when the Nazis invaded on May 13, 1940, and subsequently broadcast in exile over Radio Oranje. Gerrit and Cor operated a garden in Leidschendam and were raising their growing family when the Nazis arrived, an invasion that was mild at first but grew more stringent as the Dutch proved increasingly intransigent in the face of crackdown. Gerrit, a veteran in his 30s, was mobilized for a hasty, ill-prepared resistance by the Dutch army—though after the devastating German bombardment of Rotterdam, the country, at Wilhelmina’s command, surrendered. The authors’ alternating micro/macro viewpoint is thoroughly effective in portraying an entire country in the throes of war. Rationing, round-ups of Jews, arbitrary raids for available men and labor, bombings and random acts of violence by Nazi soldiers became the norm. The authors depict the infamous collaboration of the treasonous socialist Anton Mussert, as well as countless heroic moments by local people who harbored Jews and other refugees. Meanwhile, Wilhelmina sent heartening missives from exile, while her daughter, Juliana, who eventually took over the throne, and granddaughters were safely ensconced in Ottawa, Canada.
A full-bodied, moving story of a battered populace that refused to be annihilated.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-56157-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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