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STILL WE DANCED FORWARD

WORLD WAR II AND THE WRITER'S LIFE

An uncritical assemblage of information about six famous writers and how they spent the years of fascism's rise and WW II. These portraits do little more than juxtapose summaries of the subjects' careers with hackneyed chronologies of the war. A wide middle ground of context and interpretation seems missing between the writers' own accounts—the diaries and letters Sonnenberg largely relies upon—and the rote unfolding of history. With Hemingway and Ezra Pound, life and war are inherently intertwined, but others test the foundation of Sonnenberg's project. The detachment of Virginia Woolf and the adamant passivity of Colette are curious but don't bear the tedious recounting given here. Apart from his abortive stint as a war correspondent, Steinbeck comes off as irrelevant to such a study. After a detailed account of Pound's increasingly wild behavior through the war years, his ``Pisan Cantos'' simply appear, deus ex machina, as transcendent art; Sonnenberg has little to say about how they emerged from what came before. Most odd is Sonnenberg's cultish adulation of Thomas Mann as both an artist and an anti-fascist. Her literary analysis is mostly plot summary, decorated by useless adjectives of praise, like ``awesome''—in Mann's case, piled so absurdly high as to give the whole book an unsettling cast of eccentricity. Propped up here and there by phrases about artists' relationship to their times and their societies, the studies do not spring from, nor do they produce, much coherent thought about such things and are even startlingly contradictory: Colette's ``neutrality'' is explained sympathetically, but Sonnenberg later declares that ``one either opposed fascism with all one's might or one became a swarmy [sic] accomplice.'' Trite in style as well as content, this resembles nothing more than a series of overgrown book reports. (b&w photos not seen)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997

ISBN: 1-57488-013-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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