An invaluable account of genuine heroism in the midst of one of the most terrifying episodes of human history.
How businessmen, ministers, secretaries, and others carried on unarmed resistance during World War II.
Koreman (The Expectation of Justice: France, 1944-1946, 2000), a former history professor, is the daughter of Dutch parents who took part in the resistance. Given exclusive access to archives of the era, she presents the history of Dutch-Paris, a group that aided more than 3,000 Jews, political refugees, freedom fighters, and downed Allied airmen to escape the German occupiers in three countries. The book’s central figure is Jean Weidner (1912-1994), a Dutch businessman who lived in France, near the Swiss border. Weidner’s business took him frequently across the border, where his wife worked. When he was contacted by a Dutch Jew seeking a way to escape with his family to neutral territory, Weidner decided to help even though there were already laws against helping Jews escape. That began Weidner’s resistance career, and his network stretched from the Netherlands and Belgium to neutral Spain and Switzerland. Koreman thoroughly documents the process by which refugees were smuggled to safety, with stories of hairbreadth escapes, betrayals, and the human drama of dozens of ordinary people doing what they could to help others escape the Nazi horror. Unfortunately, not all were lucky enough to avoid the Germans’ efforts to clamp down on the escape routes. The author is a deft narrator, drawing on original documents and survivors’ accounts, and despite the grim realities of living in Nazi-occupied territory, there are enough lighter moments to give readers a well-rounded perspective. There is an enormous amount of detail about the various participants, with maps of the different cities that figure in the narrative and appendices listing members of Dutch-Paris and those they helped to escape, plus a glossary, a timeline, and a list of archives consulted.
An invaluable account of genuine heroism in the midst of one of the most terrifying episodes of human history.Pub Date: May 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-066227-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2018
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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