A more streamlined narrative would have been welcome. All the same, a solid contribution to the literature of World War II,...
Overlong history of Europe between 1914 and 1945, the age of totalitarian empires and what Gellately (History/Florida State Univ.) (Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 2001, etc.) calls “the great catastrophe” whose origins lie in Leninism.
Solzhenitsyn would approve, and so would the authors of The Black Book of Communism, none of whom would find Gellately’s thesis extraordinary. However, since by the author’s account so many academics hasten to distinguish the “good” Lenin from the “bad” Lenin, the idea that the 20th-century bloodletting somehow begins with him may prove controversial. Gellately defends his position well, and indeed even loyal Leon Trotsky allowed that Lenin “was driven to distraction,” as Gellately puts it, “when other Bolsheviks did not grasp or agree that Communism could be realized only by paying a heavy price in human lives.” The dictatorship that Lenin and his ambitious acolyte Stalin forced upon Russia was open to Jewish revolutionaries, a point not lost on Hitler when he came to power; Gellately argues that Hitler’s war on the Soviet Union was “an extension of his war against the Jews,” summarized by Hitler’s conflation of “Jewish Bolshevism”; had Hitler kept his war confined to the Jews, Gellately observes in passing, many citizens of the Soviet regime would have proved sympathetic and even would have collaborated, but Hitler chose to make war on all things Soviet instead. Interestingly, Gellately notes toward the end of his book, Stalin’s postwar pogroms may have been a delayed reaction to Hitler’s charge; Stalin was no fan of Jewish Bolshevism either, but even so his “turn to anti-Semitism was out of character…and a complete contradiction of what Marxists had said about the Jewish question for almost a century.” Such things will prove revelations for many readers, but much of Gellately’s narrative repeats well-known facts about the various dictators’ rise and fall.
A more streamlined narrative would have been welcome. All the same, a solid contribution to the literature of World War II, totalitarianism and the bloody 20th century.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4005-6
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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