by Peter Godman ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 25, 2004
While critical of the papacy, a more balanced treatment of its policy than Cornwell’s—though a longer, more intensive...
Controversy over the Roman Catholic Church’s alleged “silence” about the crimes of Nazism shows no sign of being settled, despite the overly optimistic subtitle of this flawed but revealing history.
Godman, a Vatican scholar who has taught most recently at the Univ. of Rome, was the first allowed to see the archives of the Roman Inquisition, the Vatican body in charge of faith and morals, where debates on the Nazis occurred. Materials related to these deliberations were considered so dangerous that in 1940 they were moved to the US to avoid falling into Axis hands. In contrast to John Cornwell’s sensational but shoddy Hitler’s Pope, Godman absolves Pope Pius XII of anti-Semitism. Yet he finds the papacy fallible in formulating a strategy as Hitler and Mussolini cast ever-larger shadows across Europe. The roots of the problem, Godman suggests, lay not in the papacy of Pius XII but in that of his predecessor, Pius XI. As cardinal–Secretary of State, Pius XII (then known as Eugenio Pacelli) hewed to the line set by his mentor, “in that spirit of diplomatic legalism appropriate to his role and congenial to his character.” The real advance here lies in the depiction of the Vatican, a bureaucracy riven with competing agendas that not even the pope could wholly master. By 1935, angered by the Nazis’ flagrant violations of a concordat, their use of eugenics, and their racism, Pius XI secretly commissioned a pair of German Jesuits to prepare a condemnation that listed 47 heretical propositions of the regime. But the document ended up watered down in a wider condemnation that linked Nazism with Communism and Fascism as “errors of the age”—and even that was shelved because the German bishops were uncertain how to react to Hitler’s mix of lies and threats. Although Godman has uncovered important new information on the behind-the-scenes maneuverings between Rome and Berlin, he does not always present it with clarity. Worse, he stops in 1939, just before Pacelli succeeded Pius XI, so that the wartime action and inaction of the Vatican that have ignited opprobrium are undiscussed.
While critical of the papacy, a more balanced treatment of its policy than Cornwell’s—though a longer, more intensive treatment is still in order.Pub Date: March 25, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4597-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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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