A powerful screed against Euro-racism, diminished slightly by its tone of cosmopolitan revulsion.
British journalist Fraser, in the course of shaping a television documentary, surveyed the topography and assessed the personalities of Continental hatred.
His book is a tour of nightmare Europe, from the tormentors of Asians in Leicester to the ill-disguised Nazi wannabes of Belgium, from Holocaust denier David Irving to French Front fascist Le Pen. From anti-Semitic Gallic provinces to Slavic hell, Fraser expertly sets the scene for deconstructing the mad fustian and malevolent bombast of EU xenophobia. The lunatics, the vigilantes, the demonic right-wing nuts are examined in person, interviewed by the author with fascinated curiosity tinged with patent distaste. (He succumbs to physical nausea after one tête-à-tête.) The protagonist-reporter, consorting with demagogues in cheap suits and skinheads in Doc Martens instead of jackboots, is, understandably, not entirely objective. Delightfully ad hominem, he describes the halitosis, glass eyes, stained fingers, blotched complexions, and rodent teeth of his nasty subjects. World-weary disgust is Fraser’s forte, and soon his text takes on the style of politics discussed while sucking on an unfiltered cig pinched between thumb and forefinger. But this is an urgent alarm. Are these performers actually threatening a return to the awful middle of the 20th century—for which see the ethnically cleansed Balkans—or are they simply demonic totems like, perhaps, Austria’s Herr Haider? Does press observation alter and foster the evil subjects being observed? How far does, should, or must tolerance go? Ultimately, Fraser concludes, there is an incipient danger, if not yet a clear and present one. Banal or not, he says, the only real hindrance to hatred rests with each of us.
A powerful screed against Euro-racism, diminished slightly by its tone of cosmopolitan revulsion.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-107-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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