A damning indictment of French collaboration with the Nazi regime. Historian Burrin (Hitler and the Jews, not reviewed, etc.; Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva) has immersed himself in the archives and emerged with a disturbing portrait of war-time France under the German occupation. From Paris, Munich, Bonn, and Rome, the evidence is indisputable: Only a tiny minority of the French opted for active resistance to the Nazis; the vast majority saw no other choice but to submit. That submission ran the gamut from quiet rage and hatred to active support of and participation in the worst aspects of Nazi rule. Americans might find it difficult to empathize with these French citizens, yet Burrin reminds us that we are fortunate to have escaped the experience of foreign occupation for over 200 years (and some might even dispute labeling British rule here as ``foreign''). Three sections of French society are scrutinized: the government, civil society, and the ``intellectuals'' (politicians, journalists, and academics). This division may perhaps be artificial, since clearly the three categories overlap; indeed, a single person could be in all three divisions at once. Burrin invites us into the world of the collaborationist, showing how it was often difficult to choose sides. At the same time, he reveals the always sordid reality of collaboration through access to newly opened Vichy police files and information gleaned from telephone taps and mail censorship. The reader is left with the clear realization that the uniquely French disease cited by the French scholar Henri Rousso as ``the Vichy syndrome'' was endemic and may still infect French right-wing political groups today.
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 1997
ISBN: 1-56584-323-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
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