With a keen eye for detail, Isenberg (English/Marist Coll.; A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry, 2001, etc.) explores...
Academic portrayal of an American socialite who became integral to the Austrian Nazi Resistance.
In many ways, Muriel Gardiner’s existence was the embodiment of the American dream. Though she was born into privilege to two of Chicago’s most prominent meatpacking families, her grandfathers were both self-made men, with stories straight out of a Horatio Alger story. Both were born in 1839 to poor families and ended up scions of American industry, but they took very different paths. Gardiner’s maternal grandfather started as a butcher’s assistant on Cape Cod, while her paternal grandfather, a German Jew, was sent to America at age 12 to apprentice with his traveling-salesman uncle. Gardiner wasn’t a typical society girl. Starting with a controversial student agenda at Wellesley, she eschewed the life planned out for her in the hopes of helping others. She traveled to Europe, where she became a disciple of Sigmund Freud and a close confidant of his daughter, Anna Freud. Gardiner earned a graduate degree from Oxford, married and divorced, had several scandalous affairs, began raising a child on her own and enrolled in medical school in Vienna. It was there, on the dawn of World War II, that Gardiner began her most radical work after falling in love with a revolutionary. She became a key member of the underground Austrian resistance, putting herself in great peril and enduring the anguish of sending her daughter away in order to harbor and arrange for the escape of hundreds of Jews.
With a keen eye for detail, Isenberg (English/Marist Coll.; A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry, 2001, etc.) explores Gardiner’s life and admirable sacrifices, but the narrative lacks the emotional depth readers may expect from such riveting raw material.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-230-61565-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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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