Though the explorations in mass psychology may not convince all readers, Rhodes exposes the industrial logic that underlies...
A grim tale of the Shoah’s early years, delivered by accomplished journalist and Pulitzer-winning historian Rhodes (Why They Kill, 1999, etc.).
The Final Solution, he acknowledges, was inherent in the founding premises of the Hitler regime, but its mechanisms were refined only gradually, after hastily organized massacres committed by “ordinary men” led to the development of the vastly more efficient death camps. Exploring familiar themes of psychopathology and technology put to evil uses, Rhodes writes that the scarcely controlled violence of the SS Einsatzgruppen in Nazi-occupied portions of Eastern Europe effectively brutalized German soldiers, setting in motion a violent cycle that could become only more virulent: “a vicious circle . . . whereby the perversion of discipline bred increasing barbarism, which in turn further brutalized discipline.” Yet this sort of catch-as-catch-can war on the enemies of the Nazi state was just a shade too nasty for the SS leadership, which worried about creating “neurotics or brutes” on the Eastern Front who might later become disciplinary problems at home. Heinrich Himmler, Rhodes writes, was shocked by witnessing an incident in Russia in which German soldiers lost their nerve and “shot badly,” wounding two Jewish women who writhed before him on the ground; he screamed at the firing squad to put the women out of their misery. Himmler apparently had no such qualms about the bloodless—and, in his estimation, more humane—dispatch of his victims by means of nerve gas, which prompted the development of large-scale killing factories such as Auschwitz and Sobibor. Drawing heavily on first-person accounts and official documents, the author contributes to our understanding of how the Final Solution was put into motion and how it subsequently evolved.
Though the explorations in mass psychology may not convince all readers, Rhodes exposes the industrial logic that underlies modern genocide.Pub Date: May 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40900-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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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