Suspenseful, sketchy and somewhat vulgar—these accounts render no one’s finest hour.
Dramatic, sordid recap of the most horrendous closing moments of World War II, which “began with the murder of Mussolini and ended with the news that Hitler had killed himself at his bunker in Berlin.”
There is a sensational element to this work by British journalist Best (The Greatest Day in History, 2008), narrated alongside frank, graphic primary accounts. The author covers the action over five decisive days at the closing of the war, beginning with Apr. 28, 1945, when Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were shot, driven to Milan and strung up for ghastly display. On the 30th, inside the Chancellery in Berlin, Hitler shot himself while his brand-new wife Eva Braun ingested a poison pill, leaving Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as successor in command. As the fighting raged to the last man at the Reichstag, and Russians raped German women and killed indiscriminately, SS head Heinrich Himmler separately sent out conciliatory messages to the British and Americans, generating wild rumors in the Western press. After the bunker suicides and clumsy burning of the bodies, the remnant staff planned their escape through the blasted streets of Berlin. The news of Hitler’s suicide made Stalin’s May Day celebrations in Moscow; the Americans were dropping food supplies over Holland for the starving residents as part of Operation Chowhound; Private Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict, eagerly deserted his post with the “liberation” of Munich by the Americans and headed home; and Hamburg was declared an open city on May 1 by Gauleiter Kaufmann, acting on his own initiative. In addition to engaging suspense, Best provides plenty of moments of prurience—e.g., orgies in the bunker’s dentist chair; the looting of Eva Braun’s knickers by the first Russian visitors.
Suspenseful, sketchy and somewhat vulgar—these accounts render no one’s finest hour.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-61492-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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