by Pierre Ayçoberry & translated by Janet Lloyd ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1999
A significant contribution to the study of German society under Nazism. Ayáoberry (Contemporary History, Emeritus/Univ. of Human Sciences, Strasbourg; The Nazi Question, 1981) has produced a complex sociological analysis of life in Hitler’s Third Reich. Noting that the movement and the regime were the products of violent ideas and acts, he begins by discussing the violence that accompanied Hitler’s accession to power. He then proceeds to cover all the participants in the terrible ordeal that was Hitler’s Germany and tries to show who was likely to belong to which group, and why. Perhaps his signal achievement is the portrayal of the Third Reich as an eminently complex society, where people from all classes, with divergent experiences, acted in ways that defy easy classification. The constants of the Reich, from violence and death to propaganda and corruption, have been known for years. It is the degree to which people were violent, or why they murdered Jews, or how much they believed or refused to acknowledge, that are the significant questions to answer. Finding the German people complicit in war and genocide, Eyáoberry repeatedly stresses the human frailty and opportunism that, within the contexts of national tradition and totalitarian oppression, became the main causes for so much death and destruction. In the end, he concludes, German society as a whole did become Nazified, however one may define that term. In particular, the pillars of modern Germany—the military, the churches, industry, and the state bureaucracy—all failed to uphold the so-called civilized values they espoused, with catastrophic results. Regrettably, Ayáoberry, by failing to consider Burleigh and Wippermann’s The Racial State and Friedlander’s Nazi Germany and the Jews, downplays the impact that Nazi racial indoctrination and anti-Semitism had on German society. A learned work that all knowledgeable students of the period will have to consult for years to come.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56584-549-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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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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