An affecting and valuable addition to the literature of war and genocide.
Yugoslavian-born Owen (Art Education Emerita/Wright State Univ.) vividly recalls her youth amid post-WWII ethnic cleansing.
Yugoslavia’s ruling communists, intent on avenging the Nazi occupation, in 1945 began systematically persecuting ethnic Germans who had lived there for centuries. Owen’s family were among those victimized, yet when she returned in the 1990s to the village of Knicancin, there were no signs of the graveyard where hundreds were buried, including her grandmother, nor any markers indicating what had happened. None of the villagers wanted to talk about it either. Owens, now 66, nostalgically evokes her prewar childhood, depicting such seasonal rituals as gathering plums to make schnapps, slaughtering the pig that provided sausages and hams through the winter, celebrating Christmas, with its feast and gifts. She recalls that the Jews, Hungarians, Germans, and Serbs of her native village all comfortably coexisted until the war began. First, the Jewish families were taken away, next the men (including her father) were drafted into the German army, and finally the victorious Serbs turned on the other groups. Ethnic Germans were advised to flee, and her family began preparing to, but they left it too late. Together with her mother and other relatives, Owens was removed from her home, put on a train, and sent to a special village where she lived in rudimentary quarters, sharing a house with 40 other people. Those who could not work were put in concentration camps; the elderly and the children, many of them orphans, soon died from malnutrition and disease. The author movingly recalls the hardships they endured—little or no food, forced labor, children separated from their families—and the rare kindnesses, as when a Serbian housewife gave food to Luisa and her mother. The outside world eventually took notice, and the family was able to emigrate to the US in 1951.
An affecting and valuable addition to the literature of war and genocide.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2003
ISBN: 1-58544-212-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Texas A&M Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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