Dispiriting yet solidly rendered history.
A history of a pivotal year in the Weimar Republic.
Jones, professor of history and author of Founding Weimar, reminds us that the Treaty of Versailles required Germany to pay massive reparations, mostly to France, which had suffered enormous physical destruction. Although largely undamaged, an exhausted Germany was slow to pay, so a frustrated France sent troops into the industrial Ruhr Valley in January 1923 to extract resources. The occupation outraged almost every German but, hobbled by its tiny post-Versailles army, the Weimar government proclaimed a policy of passive resistance. Neither nation benefited. France obtained far less material after the invasion than the year before, and the cost of Germany’s passive resistance—paying striking workers, supporting resisters expelled from their homes—was greater than it spent on reparations. With no tax revenue from the occupied areas, the government was forced to print more money. By spring, inflation was accelerating; by fall, it had reached catastrophic proportions. That year proved a bonanza for Hitler, whose charisma enraptured innumerable fanatic splinter parties searching for a messiah to make Germany great again. By 1923, he was a major player in Bavaria. Putsches were a regular feature of postwar Germany, and Hitler launched his in November. However, incompetence and police quashed it within a day. Jones emphasizes that Bavaria was governed by right-wing Weimar-haters who had no objection to Hitler’s violent, antisemitic politics, but also considered him a rival. By December, financial reforms, a new chancellor, and international pressures on France were improving matters. The author concludes that Weimar’s survival for another decade proves the resilience of democracy, but readers may conclude that Hitler represented the wave of the future. Lenin and Mussolini took power by coups, but Hitler was appointed legally in 1933. In the 21st century, free elections have chosen autocrats in a dozen nations, and hyper-nationalistic parties are flourishing in other democracies, including Germany. This book makes a good complement to Volker Ullrich’s Germany 1923.
Dispiriting yet solidly rendered history.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9781541600201
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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