An astute, significant academic study of how civilization can go horribly wrong. Never again?
Perhaps now, generations after the atrocities committed under the Nazi regime, it’s time to take measure of what has happened to the perpetrators, the victims, and the few survivors. Fulbrook (German History/Univ. Coll. London, A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, 2012, etc.) does just that.
The author effectively describes the brutal Germanic efficiency in the industrialized murder of homosexuals, “asocials,” and, overwhelmingly, Jews. Throughout her substantial text, Fulbrook movingly vivifies her outstanding research with individual histories. The methodological murders by the Third Reich began with the elimination of disabled, “useless” adults and children in the name of eugenic cleansing. Torture, dehumanization, and killing followed, and a considerable portion of the German population knew about the atrocities. Thousands were employed in the death camps, soldiers sent home snapshots of mass shootings, roundups were openly conducted in villages and cities, major industries worked expendable slave labor, and smoke filled the air in neighborhoods near the ovens. “The ‘it’ about which people allegedly ‘knew nothing’ was raging all around them,” writes Fulbrook. Nevertheless, the killers professed ignorance: “ ‘Forgetting’ seemed to be a privilege of the persecutors.” There were some postwar trials. The Russians were assiduous in meting out punishment, the Western allies less so, but few perpetrators were punished or even tried. The capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann brought fresh attention to Nazi crimes, but with the passage of time, it grew late for punishment of the culpable or compensation for anyone. Despite the increasing availability of memoirs, Anne Frank’s narrative, recovery of stolen artworks, film and TV presentations of Holocaust stories, and museums and monuments, through the decades and the passing of the afflicted survivors and their affected progeny, more persecutors evaded justice. “This continuing imbalance,” writes the author, “can only be recognized, and no longer rectified,” As they read this important contribution to Holocaust studies, especially now in the time of neo-Nazis, readers may wonder, is it all in the past?
An astute, significant academic study of how civilization can go horribly wrong. Never again?Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-068124-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
