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 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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