Readers who are looking for an answer to Cornwell may find this book helpful; those who have followed the controversy about...
Ever since the appearance of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy in 1963, the role of Pope Pius XII during the WWII has been a subject of heated controversy, a controversy that has intensified in recent years as the Vatican proceeds with the investigation that may eventually lead to his beatification. Rychlak (Law/Univ. of Mississippi) here presents a defense of the pontiff.
The first third of the book offers a look at the early careers of Pius XII and Hitler, the situation of the Catholic church in the postwar world, the uneasy relations between the papacy and the governments of a united Italy that culminated in the Lateran Treaty, the rise of Nazism, and the negotiations that led to the 1933 concordat between Germany and the Vatican. The remaining two-thirds is largely made up of a review of the events of the war years, the statements and actions of the pope, and the reactions to them by the Allies, the Axis, and Jewish and humanitarian organizations. The last chapter considers questions frequently asked about Pius and his behavior during the war. Was he an anti-Semite? Would a statement from Pius have diminished Jewish suffering? Should he have excommunicated Hitler? An epilogue contains a detailed refutation of John Cornwell’s controversial study Hitler’s Pope (1999, not reviewed). On every count, Rychlak finds the case against Pius wanting. Rychlak says that “to evaluate [Pius’s] performance, one must begin by looking at all of the evidence in context,” and so he has surrounded Pius’s story with details that will be familiar to many readers and are of arguable relevance to a judgment on Pius. Even in the context Rychlak provides, some of the more serious charges (such as Pius’s reaction to the Nazi roundup of Jews of Rome in October 1943) remain disturbing; others (like the alleged assistance the church gave to fugitive war criminals) are disposed of in passing.
Readers who are looking for an answer to Cornwell may find this book helpful; those who have followed the controversy about Pius XII will find little new here.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58571-006-7
Page Count: 548
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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