by Olly Komenda-Soentgerath ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 1996
A memoir of personal suffering that founders on its blindness to larger questions of history and morality. Komenda-Soentgerath is a poet, and her story is one worth telling. Why, then, is this volume so unsatisfying? A wooden translation from the German is partly to blame. But the deeper reason lies in an unavoidable comparison with the most compelling Holocaust memoirs, personal narratives that rise to universality. Komenda-Soentgerath's story is, to a fault, entirely personal. The narrative follows her sudden arrest as a young woman by Czech revolutionary guards in the period immediately following the end of WW II (she was of German origin and lived in a Prague neighborhood favored by the Nazis), and describes her internment in a variety of camps over the next year and a half. Through a combination of sheer good fortune and the decent and even chivalrous behavior of some fellow Czechs, she was eventually released. In a final stroke of luck, the author and her mother obtained the visas necessary to escape the uncertainties of Czechoslovakia, and Komenda-Soentgerath joined her German fiancÇ in Cologne. One of the most striking aspects of this account is the fact that, while it is surely a story of hardship and acute dangers, what stays with the reader is the behavior of the Czechs who tried to aid the author. More than once she was safeguarded from rape by men who watched over her. But we can't judge whether this was the result of Czech manners or of a deep dissatisfaction with the Communist regime, because Komenda- Soentgerath never thinks to pursue such questions. In fact, the broader political context of the war, the Holocaust, and the postwar period are entirely lacking. Such failures make this memoir seem merely self-absorbed. Curiously, it was awarded a special prize by the German Ministry of the Interior this year.
Pub Date: Nov. 5, 1996
ISBN: 1-85610-041-3
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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