Every reader of Anne Frank’s Diary will want to have this superbly rendered tale of scholarly detection at hand.
An extraordinary tale of modern science and old-fashioned gumshoe work applied to a world-renowned crime 80 years after the fact.
On Aug. 4, 1944, a German “Jew-hunting unit” searched an Amsterdam warehouse and discovered the family of young Anne Frank in a hidden apartment. The Franks had been sheltering there for more than two years, shielded by paterfamilias Otto’s workers. He alone survived the death camps. Hauntingly, as Sullivan writes, the last sighting of Anne was at Auschwitz, where, “delirious with typhus,” she was “naked except for a blanket covering her shoulders.” The officer who led that German squad wound up as an inspector in the Austrian police, while Otto spent his life overseeing Anne’s memory through the publication of her diary. But who exposed the Franks’ hiding place to the Nazis? That was the question some 50 data scientists, historians, forensic scientists, and other researchers, mostly Dutch, had before them, and it’s the overarching question of this book. With the aid of retired FBI special agent Vince Pankoke, the team used artificial intelligence, behavioral psychology, and other modern methods to find out, examining numerous possible suspects. Only one met the familiar categories of knowledge, motive, and opportunity. The investigative team determined that he was a Jewish notary who used the Franks’ sanctum as a bargaining chip to save his own family. On returning to Amsterdam, Otto received an anonymous note revealing his betrayer’s identity. He did not broadcast it because, the investigators conclude, Frank may have recognized the man’s desperate situation as he made that fateful decision to collaborate. Sullivan’s narrative, full of twists and turns and dead-end leads, commands attention at every page, dramatic without being sensational. She writes, memorably, of Otto’s work after the death of their Judas: “He wanted [everyone] to know that fascism builds slowly and then one day it is an iron wall that looms and cannot be circumvented.”
Every reader of Anne Frank’s Diary will want to have this superbly rendered tale of scholarly detection at hand.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-062-89235-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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