Lyman’s book does not supplant Shirer’s firsthand accounts or Flanner’s and Gellhorn’s reports from the field, but it makes...
Historical study of American expatriates and travelers—George Kennan, Eric Sevareid, Josephine Baker, and many more—in the dawning years of World War II.
If most Americans were murky on the details of Hitler’s regime until after the United States entered the fight in 1941, some had very specific information gleaned from close-up study: journalists, diplomats, scholars, writers, artists, and others who found themselves in Europe in the late 1930s. British historian Lyman (Among the Headhunters: An Extraordinary World War II Story of Survival in the Burmese Jungle, 2016, etc.) populates his pages with some of the better known of them, including William L. Shirer, who, as a Berlin correspondent, witnessed the Nazi regime’s rise to power, and Martha Gellhorn, who tracked fascism as she traveled through Europe. Others are now perhaps less well known to general readers, such as Janet Flanner, who was in Austria at the time of the Anschluss and marveled at how deliberately anti-Semitic laws were put into place. “Jewish doctors and lawyers were slowly being deprived of their right to practice,” writes the author, “although for the time being Flanner was still able to buy from Jewish shops, many of which continued to trade.” Flanner turns up later in the book, now in Paris, where she further marveled at the efficiency of the Nazi machine, thanks to “the German passion for bureaucracy.” The most compelling parts of Lyman’s portraits of Americans in Europe in the time of what Churchill called “the gathering storm” concern people most readers will not have heard of, such as the Quaker aid worker Leonard Kenworthy, whose dreams were haunted by the faces of the Jews whom he could not save after the Nazi deportations began. “Quaker diligence, faithfulness, hard work, and prayer came to nothing in the face of Nazi indifference to their fate," the author concludes.
Lyman’s book does not supplant Shirer’s firsthand accounts or Flanner’s and Gellhorn’s reports from the field, but it makes a useful supplement.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-736-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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