An important text whose dense design may dissuade some general readers but whose thorough research supplies some significant...
A veteran recording producer and authority on Jewish music debuts with a richly detailed history of Jewish musicians—not just composers—who were threatened by the Holocaust.
The author set for himself some difficult tasks: telling riveting personal stories, providing historical and cultural contexts, explaining the types of music that composers were creating before and during the rise of the Nazis, charting the conflicts about music that raged among the musicians themselves. On nearly every page, Haas reveals his vast knowledge about the era and its principals, but his style is often thick and academic, and many long quotations block rather than enhance the flow of his narrative. Appearing throughout is critic Julius Korngold, early champion of Gustav Mahler; the author includes long passages of Korngold’s writing. Haas describes the musical life in Austria and Germany before the Nazis and reminds us that many Jews in Germany were secular and defined themselves as German. He tells the story of the end of World War I and the “mass exodus” of intellectuals and artists from Vienna to Berlin. He follows the rise of expressionism and continually brings before us the names of artists unfamiliar to many—Ernst Toch, Hanns Eisler, Edmund Meisel, Hans Gál, Egon Wellesz and many more. Haas describes the conflict between the Romantics and the rising influence of Arnold Schoenberg, and he does not neglect Wagner’s ugly influence. Many musicians who escaped the Nazis found employment in the film and other entertainment industries. Americans, writes the author, were glad to welcome into their orchestras the notables from Europe. Haas also spends some time on musical life within the death camps and charts the effects on the music world of denazification after the war.
An important text whose dense design may dissuade some general readers but whose thorough research supplies some significant pages in the account of some of history’s darkest decades.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-15430-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
HISTORY | MODERN | 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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