An entertaining story of the irresistible cult of a creepy car.
The shadowy provenance of a wartime German limousine and the dizzying succession of owners over decades afterward.
Historian Klara (The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America’s Most Famous Residence, 2013, etc.) first became entranced by the story of the massive Mercedes Benz Grosser 770K limousine, which had made its way to America after World War II, as a young boy in the 1970s when “Hitler’s touring car” was displayed in a county fair in upstate New York. The author does an admirable sleuthing job in debunking some of the myths surrounding this legendary car; it was part of a fleet of similar Grosser armored limousines custom made in the late 1930s and early ’40s for the Nazi leadership. Two cars, in particular, have traceable genealogies. One, purchased by a Chicago exporter, Christopher Janus, from a Swedish company to settle a debt in June 1948, was touted as Hitler’s private car and arrived shortly thereafter by ship to New York City, followed by enormous public curiosity. Janus planned to drum up some money for charity by touring with the car, banking on the public’s fascination with its original owner. What Janus chose to ignore was that his car was actually a gift given by Hitler to the Finnish president, Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, for allowing the Nazis to stage the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 from Finnish soil. The other limousine of note became a war trophy of U.S. Sgt. Joe Azara, an amateur mechanic who managed to steal away with the massive limousine at Berchtesgaden until it was “borrowed” by a superior and became the “Göring Special,” a kind of party car that was displayed and then warehoused in the U.S. for years before finding its way to the Canadian War Museum. Myths surrounding the cars escalated, and at an auction in 1973, “Hitler’s car” was sold for a whopping world record $153,000.
An entertaining story of the irresistible cult of a creepy car.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-06972-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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