A worthy survey for modern-day resisters as well as students of world history.
Exploration of the many ways, nonviolent and otherwise, that anti-fascists have fought enemy regimes over the last century and longer.
“Why didn’t more people resist Nazism?” Berryman is often asked. The author replies that it depends on what one means by resistance. The founder of the Ninth Candle, a nonprofit that helps schools improve Holocaust education, Berryman writes that not every German under Hitler’s rule had the wherewithal or access to bomb the Führer in his bunker, but there were layers of resistance at work all the same, ranging from active political resistance to nonconformity, refusal, and protest. When the Nazis seemed to be out on the fringe in the 1920s, Berryman holds, “the most persistent of [the] early resisters were the cartoonists who worked for satirical magazines.” That continued until censorship set in; one telling cartoon from 1933 depicts Nazi violence taking place off in the distance while ordinary Germans strolled by, blissfully unaware. Just as dangerous was joining “pirate groups,” most of them populated by working-class youngsters who didn’t attend school but who were too young for military service, and who “all…rejected the Nazis.” Some even distinguished themselves by listening to forbidden jazz music. From prison camp revolts to ghetto uprisings and partisan warfare, some resistance took deadlier form. Berryman also includes the wartime experience of a Black American soldier, Leon Bass, who helped liberate Buchenwald and returned to the U.S. committed to the cause of civil rights, saying, “Nazism in Germany is the other side of racism and Jim Crow segregation.” Pointedly, Berryman extends his series of profiles to the present, given the resurgence of nationalist and white supremacist movements throughout the West: Not all are Nazis, strictly defined, he notes, but there are “enough points of overlap to give the stories in this book fresh relevance.”
A worthy survey for modern-day resisters as well as students of world history.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9798881800703
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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
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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