A concise history of victory’s aftermath.
Chronicling “a solemn but glorious hour.”
Hilmes, author of Berlin 1936: Fascism, Fear, Triumph (2018), opens on the official end of World War II in Europe—May 8, 1945—with a kaleidoscope of scenes in national capitals. Crowds celebrate, famous exiled Germans (Thomas Mann, Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht) express their opinions, and, in their homeland, Nazis make themselves scarce. SS chief Heinrich Himmler turns up, objects to his reception, and kills himself. Hilmes reminds readers that Winston Churchill, despite his charisma, remained a conservative aristocrat who never lacked food, shelter, employment, and was shocked to be voted out of office by Britons who yearned to share his good fortune. The author writes that President Harry Truman was, in some ways, an improvement over President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was under the mistaken impression that he could manipulate Stalin. The summer of 1945 ends with Japan’s surrender in September, but Germany holds the author’s focus, and he paints a less cheerful picture than the usual American documentary. Unprepared for millions of surrendering Nazi soldiers, the Allies packed them into massive encampments lacking food and sanitation. Millions of refugees expelled from Eastern Europe fared little better until international organizations got their acts together. Details of the Holocaust were not widely known, and survivors encountered as much antisemitism as ever. Berliners cleared rubble and searched for food but also packed the cinemas and concert halls, which opened within weeks of the war’s end. “There are now more than thirty cinemas open in Berlin,” a Red Army soldier writes to his daughter. “The cinema employees say that there has never before been such an inux of people as there is now.” The future was just around the corner.
A concise history of victory’s aftermath.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781635425413
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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 Yorkerstaff 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 2026 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.
