As Elie Wiesel once said, the question after Auschwitz is not “How is it possible to believe in God?” but “how can one...
Witnesses to the Nazi war machine experienced “illusion, hope, anguish, and indifference.”
In this startlingly illuminating history, Fritzsche (History/Univ. of Illinois; Life and Death in the Third Reich, 2008, etc.) draws on copious diaries, letters, and memoirs to convey the texture of everyday life for French, Polish, and Swiss citizens during World War II. As late as September 1939, the author discovered, Europeans deeply feared another war; many felt willing to accommodate the Third Reich, “not least because they imagined ordinary Germans to be as peace loving as they themselves were” and misunderstood Hitler’s “imperial intentions.” But Nazi brutality soon became terrifyingly real. In the summer and fall of 1941, Germans had “killed one of every five hundred people on the planet” and embarked upon their extermination of Jews. Yet even when Jews were rounded up on street corners and transported in buses and trains, and even when the bodies of men, women, and children were dumped into ditches, ordinary citizens, and Jews themselves, struggled to piece together a coherent sense of what was happening. Rumor, gossip, and illegal BBC radio broadcasts provided shards of information, but these did not necessarily add up “to the systematic mass murder that the Germans were in fact carrying out.” French citizens became used to rationed food and fuel and to shivering through the coldest winters they could remember. Poles became inured to atrocity: “People walking on the street are so used to seeing corpses on the sidewalks that they pass by without any emotion,” one man confided to his diary. Besides confessing overwhelming fear and suffering, Fritzsche’s sources reflect on God: most Jews remained believers, convinced that the existence of a Jewish God “could not be imagined without the presence of Jewish believers.” Nazi soldiers wore a belt buckle stamped with the phrase “God with us.”
As Elie Wiesel once said, the question after Auschwitz is not “How is it possible to believe in God?” but “how can one believe in man?” That question is at the heart of this powerful, riveting, wrenching history.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-05774-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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