Another extraordinary story of how the bravery of one individual halted the tide of evil.
Suspenseful, cat-and-mouse account of one Vatican priest who resisted the Gestapo’s terror policies.
While Pope Pius XII was wringing his hands about Allied bombing of Rome and essentially keeping quiet while the Gestapo deported the Jews and massacred the inhabitants, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish priest and official of the Holy Office, had accidentally begun to organize an Allied escape operation by the summer of 1943. As told in this non-scholarly account by BBC journalist Walker (Forgotten Soldiers: The Irishmen Shot at Dawn, 2007), O’Flaherty had no love for the English, having been politicized by British violence against the Irish back in the 1920s while he was in apostolic college in Limerick. However, during World War II he gradually changed his mind. Thanks to O’Flaherty’s network, which offered money, false ID papers and safe houses, a trickling of British soldiers had managed to seek refuge at the Vatican, and soon others found aid during the nine months of Nazi occupation. Meanwhile, the head of Rome’s intelligence agency was the ruthless, ambitious Nazi Herbert Kappler, who organized the Fascist police force and infiltrated espionage operations in Rome. Protected by Vatican neutrality, O’Flaherty operated under the nose of the Gestapo and barely missed being kidnapped and assassinated. Following orders, Kappler was responsible for rounding up 1,000 Roman Jews for deportation to Auschwitz, as well as the cold-blooded massacre of 325 prisoners in the Ardeatine Caves in 1944. While O’Flaherty was celebrated after the war, Kappler was tried and imprisoned for life.
Another extraordinary story of how the bravery of one individual halted the tide of evil.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7627-8039-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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