by Randall Hansen ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2014
An authoritative, compelling study sure to raise hackles.
Hansen (Politics/Univ. of Toronto; Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945, 2009, etc.) examines how the German people—even the military—had had enough of Hitler’s mad schemes.
Col. Claus von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, did not manage to kill Hitler, but there were plenty of higher-up military officers who had hoped it would, and they waited anxiously for the outcome to see which way the political wind was blowing. Scholar Hansen employs his considerable knowledge of Allied movement into Germany at the close of the war to reveal where the pockets of resistance were located, especially in light of Hitler’s furious, scorched-earth endgame. Many military resisters like Stauffenberg came from the middle ranks, and the author describes them as “Bismarckian,” honor-bound and goal-oriented rather than sharing Hitler’s “nihilistic,” genocidal vision. They were fed up with Hitler’s centralization of military power, his amateur meddling and even, for those deeply Christian, appalled by the war of extermination of local populations in occupied territory. Others, like Erwin Rommel, knew the war was lost, and armaments minister Albert Speer, for reasons of power, actively circumvented many of Hitler’s decrees. As the Allied forces began to infiltrate Germany, the factors in building resistance were complex, but mainly, the Nazi command structure was breaking down. In Paris, Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz dithered, sparing the city from destruction. Southern ports of Toulon and Marseilles, although rendered German “fortresses” and ordered to be defended to the last man, were handed over to the Allies without total demolition, while the liberation of German cities, one by one, was frequently aided by civilian resistance of military command.
An authoritative, compelling study sure to raise hackles.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-19-992792-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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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