A searing depiction of the Holocaust’s opening ceremonies.
Eyewitnesses recall the degradation and devastation that 70 years ago marked a point of no return Jews in Germany.
Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass,” was actually two nights: November 9 and 10, 1938, when throughout the Third Reich (including the annexed Sudetenland and Austria) crowds engaged in a premeditated, organized pogrom. The assassination of a Nazi functionary in Paris provided the excuse, but in fact Kristallnacht continued the campaign of systematic persecution begun five years earlier with the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws; many today consider the brutal term the Nazis originally used, “Jew Action,” to be a more accurate summary of their intentions. Bard (Will Israel Survive?, 2007, etc.), the director of the Jewish Virtual Library, culls his griping oral history primarily from survivor accounts collected by other scholars and the Shoah Foundation. Overnight, power and phone lines were cut. Jewish homes, offices and shops all previously identified, were invaded, destroyed and looted. Mobs burned books, furniture, toys, schools and thousands of synagogues. Fire brigades, ready to protect adjacent Aryan property if necessary, stood by and watched the conflagrations. Marauding SS and Brown Shirts scorned Iron Crosses earned by Jewish soldiers in the Great War. They took souvenirs, stole silver and piggy banks, smashed china and pianos—and the glass windows that gave the action its historic sobriquet. Tens of thousands of adult men were seized and sent to concentration camps. Families were broken. Children were scattered. Some Jews emigrated soon after, some were murdered that night, some died by suicide. Kristallnacht has been the subject of scholarly attention, but Bard focuses on the experiences of children, reprinting powerful testimonies of the fear they felt and the hatred directed against them. A few gentiles expressed sympathy, but the majority of the German population seemed quite pleased with the Wagnerian events. There would be little popular objection to the murder of millions that was to come.
A searing depiction of the Holocaust’s opening ceremonies.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59921-445-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bibliophiles will love this fact-filled, bookish journey.
An engaging, casual history of librarians and libraries and a famous one that burned down.
In her latest, New Yorker staff writer Orlean (Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, 2011, etc.) seeks to “tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine.” It’s the story of the Los Angeles Public Library, poet Charles Bukowski’s “wondrous place,” and what happened to it on April 29, 1986: It burned down. The fire raged “for more than seven hours and reached temperatures of 2000 degrees…more than one million books were burned or damaged.” Though nobody was killed, 22 people were injured, and it took more than 3 million gallons of water to put it out. One of the firefighters on the scene said, “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell….It was surreal.” Besides telling the story of the historic library and its destruction, the author recounts the intense arson investigation and provides an in-depth biography of the troubled young man who was arrested for starting it, actor Harry Peak. Orlean reminds us that library fires have been around since the Library of Alexandria; during World War II, “the Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books.” She continues, “destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never happened.” The author also examines the library’s important role in the city since 1872 and the construction of the historic Goodhue Building in 1926. Orlean visited the current library and talked to many of the librarians, learning about their jobs and responsibilities, how libraries were a “solace in the Depression,” and the ongoing problems librarians face dealing with the homeless. The author speculates about Peak’s guilt but remains “confounded.” Maybe it was just an accident after all.
Bibliophiles will love this fact-filled, bookish journey.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4018-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
PERSPECTIVES
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The...
Former Secretary of State Clinton tells—well, if not all, at least what she and her “book team” think we ought to know.
If this memoir of diplomatic service lacks the preening self-regard of Henry Kissinger’s and the technocratic certainty of Dean Acheson’s, it has all the requisite evenhandedness: Readers have the sense that there’s not a sentence in it that hasn’t been vetted, measured and adjusted for maximal blandness. The news that has thus far made the rounds has concerned the author’s revelation that the Clintons were cash-strapped on leaving the White House, probably since there’s not enough hanging rope about Benghazi for anyone to get worked up about. (On that current hot-button topic, the index says, mildly, “See Libya.”) The requisite encomia are there, of course: “Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow.” So are the crises and Clinton’s careful qualifying: Her memories of the Benghazi affair, she writes, are a blend of her own experience and information gathered in the course of the investigations that followed, “especially the work of the independent review board charged with determining the facts and pulling no punches.” When controversy appears, it is similarly cushioned: Tinhorn dictators are valuable allies, and everyone along the way is described with the usual honorifics and flattering descriptions: “Benazir [Bhutto] wore a shalwar kameez, the national dress of Pakistan, a long, flowing tunic over loose pants that was both practical and attractive, and she covered her hair with lovely scarves.” In short, this is a standard-issue political memoir, with its nods to “adorable students,” “important partners,” the “rich history and culture” of every nation on the planet, and the difficulty of eating and exercising sensibly while logging thousands of hours in flight and in conference rooms.
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The guiding metaphor of the book is the relay race, and there’s a sense that if the torch is handed to her, well….Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5144-3
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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