An intriguing, if incomplete, account: Knox provides readers with a compelling reconsideration of the European revolutionary...
A comparative study of German Nazism and Italian Fascism, by Anglo-American historian (and Vietnam vet) Knox.
In the years following WWI, both Germany and Italy developed revolutionary movements that advertised national renewal and increased opportunities for the lower orders. Germany’s war-weakened nobility, its shattered economy, and its ineffectual representational government helped unleash ideas about competitiveness and merit that the Nazi Party would mix in with stories of Jewish backstabbing and Bolshevik subversion. Hitler argued that the conservatives and aristocrats had allowed Judeo-Bolshevik fiendishness to flourish, and that the ancien regime must be swept aside by a liberation of Aryan energies. Whereas the frailty of the German state could not stop the Nazi revolution, the ideological and institutional strength of the Catholic Church, as well as the staying power of the Italian ruling classes, limited the strength of Mussolini’s populist uprising. Just as the French Revolution found its fullest expression in the continental wars that lasted close to thirty years, Nazism and fascism reached their logical climax in the carnage of WWII. Italy’s lackluster performance during the war was due, in large part, to the failure of Mussolini’s revolt within the military and the government. On the other hand, Hitler’s plan opened up exclusive officer corps, government, and party positions to ambitious men from lower classes. When the dictator assumed command of the Wehrmacht during the retreat from Moscow, he argued that his leadership would finally wipe out old elite entitlements and open the way for men of real battle experience to command the racial and ideological struggle against the Russians. In the end, Nazism created mass expectations that merit would result in a better life. Knox goes so far as to imply that Hitlerism made modern German democracy possible (although he does not mention that it also made 50 years of Soviet rule over millions of Germans possible as well).
An intriguing, if incomplete, account: Knox provides readers with a compelling reconsideration of the European revolutionary tradition, but one hopes that he will follow through with a companion volume that traces the further careers of Nazi opportunists.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-521-58208-3
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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