Clear, concise, and compelling—a welcome corrective to the view that a principal task of historiography is to assign blame....
A swift, lucid chronicle of the first Reich.
Stürmer (History/Univ. of Erlangen-Nürnberg) is sympathetic to the German people, although not to most of their leaders in the years framing this study. Emperor William II comes off poorly (he displayed “unlimited banality of thought and action” in his years of exile). But the author notes that “history . . . has been kinder to Bismarck.” He demonstrates that the lands that are now Germany have always “seemed to play the role of chessboard in peace and battlefield in war,” offering snapshots of the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Wars, the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, and then segues smoothly into the Bismarck years, observing that as long as he “kept his influence over the King of Prussia and the German Emperor,” he was “in all but name, the ruler of Germany.” Stürmer reminds readers that in 1870 there was no “Germany”—at least not in the contemporary sense of a unified nation-state. The territory was highly fragmented, with wide variety in “bread and beer, in costume, language and local law.” He expresses some regret at Germany’s lost opportunities: its work force, technology, and natural resources could have made the last 100 years “the German century.” Instead, Germany wrote the century’s bloodiest chapters. When Bismarck exited the political stage, William II made some catastrophic miscalculations and adopted military policies that were “bound to lead to disaster.” Stürmer questions the extent of Germany’s responsibility for WWI. In a short work such as this (part of Random House’s Chronicles series), the author cannot expatiate, but he does include some arresting details (an “enigma” is the German custom of carving hearts into the doors of outhouses). And he can turn a phrase: “For William II, the whole of Germany was nothing but a giant toy.” At the close, he includes some very useful maps, a lengthy chronology, and a dramatis personae.
Clear, concise, and compelling—a welcome corrective to the view that a principal task of historiography is to assign blame. (3 maps)Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-64090-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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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