Haunting, doggedly researched but ultimately anticlimactic. The lack of decisive closure to the case tinges the outcome with...
An elusive Nazi doctor who escaped justice receives a thorough scouring by two journalists.
Former New York Times Berlin bureau chief Kulish (Last One In, 2007) and Washington Post and Daily Beast reporter Mekhennet helped break the story of Aribert Heim’s (1914–1992) eventual whereabouts and demise. Using information from Heim’s son, who spent the last days of his father’s life with him in Cairo, where he died of cancer, the authors admirably fill in many of the details of this fugitive Nazi. Heim, an Austrian doctor with the Waffen-SS who had been camp physician at Mauthausen and elsewhere, had lived in shadowy exile under an assumed name mostly in Cairo for 30 years, supported by the rents of a Berlin apartment house he owned, forwarded by his sister and other supporters. The authors underscore how many war criminals simply flew under the radar. For example, Heim, though apprehended by the Allies, passed from one detention camp to another and was finally released after three years; his incriminating role at Mauthausen was somehow wiped from his record and did not dog him during the 1950s, when he set up a practice as a gynecologist in Baden-Baden. Indeed, while he claimed to have been a victim of circumstance, a reluctant joiner of the Nazi party, eyewitnesses claim that he was a distinctive murderous authority at Mauthausen, beginning in 1941, where he was notorious for killing Jews and others too weak to live by injections of gasoline into the heart. He also performed vivisections and was known to decapitate victims and display the boiled skulls as trophies. He was conspicuous by his tall, athletic build and eerily genial manner. The authors trace over many decades the vigilant research pursued by German detective Alfred Aedtner, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and others in exposing the deeds of this criminal.
Haunting, doggedly researched but ultimately anticlimactic. The lack of decisive closure to the case tinges the outcome with bitterness.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53243-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
HISTORY | MODERN | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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