An informative but superficial expose of the responsibility of Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain and his French subjects for sending thousands of Jews to their death during WW II. British journalist Webster explains that some 76,000 Jews, a quarter of all those in France at the outbreak of WW II, were sent to the concentration camps, many from that part of France not occupied by the Germans, and many at a time when the Germans were more concerned to consolidate their position than root out Jews. Vichy legislation overturned 150 years of tolerance towards French Jews, and was being prepared early in Petain's rule. The Statut des Juifs of 1940 excluded Jews from a wide range of professions, including all elected offices, teaching, and most civil-service appointments. According to Webster, evidence suggests that this was done under German pressure. Moreover, it would have been impossible to carry out the program without the active support of the French police. Webster sees the genesis of that French attitude toward Jews in a hysterical anti-Semitism that reached its height in the late 19th century, but that continued to play a part in political life through WW II. He exposes the callousness of Petain, who was neither the benign leader he was often portrayed to be, nor the impotent puppet of his premier, Pierre Laval. Webster also notes the courage of thousands of Frenchmen (and of some Italians, in that part of France occupied by them) in protecting Jews, often at the risk of their lives; but—just one instance of the book's lack of in-depth insight—he fails to explain properly why these brave souls bucked their governments and countryfolk to save Jews. Well-researched, but pedestrian writing and analysis make for an uninspired chronicle.
Pub Date: April 14, 1991
ISBN: 0-929587-55-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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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