One man’s valiant story unearths valuable wartime details.
A dying father’s wartime army box yields a wealth of lively detail about American intelligence work in POW and displaced persons camps within the ruins of Europe.
Walter Wolff, who went on to found the furnishings maker Bon Marché, was a Jewish immigrant whose family made it to New York City in 1941, just in advance of the Nazi invasion of their country, Belgium. After attending the Dwight School in New York and becoming fluent in several European languages, Wolff was drafted into the U.S. Army in May 1943; he was not yet a citizen. The author, Wolff’s artist daughter, knew little about her father’s wartime exploits until he gave her the letters he kept in a metal box shortly before he died and she was able to read the prodigious correspondence (often written in French or German) he kept with his mother and others while serving in the military. The author’s translations are mostly verbatim and full of energy and punctuation. Starting at Camp Ritchie, in Maryland, Wolff and other “refugee soldiers” with useful language skills entered the short-lived Army Specialized Training Program located at several colleges—e.g., Virginia Tech, Yale—and at Camp Grant, in Rockford, Illinois, where Wolff was successively posted. There, he learned interrogation techniques and other types of psychological warfare. Yet the war was winding down, and time to get back to Europe and witness Germany’s debacle was growing short. So Wolff finagled a job through the Pentagon, first translating documents belonging to Mussolini, then moving into various displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria and vetting German war criminals—the latter proved to be a deeply satisfying task for Wolff. Along with Wolff’s intimately chronicled accounts of the devastation from bombings and the homelessness of Jews and others, the accompanying photographs he took himself reveal stirring remnants of an apocalypse.
One man’s valiant story unearths valuable wartime details.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62872-377-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | MILITARY | JEWISH | GENERAL HISTORY
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
