by Steven J. Ross ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 24, 2017
A vivid history of homegrown resistance.
During World War II, American Nazis planned to overthrow the U.S. government and eradicate Jews.
The director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life and an award-winning film historian, Ross (History/Univ. of Southern California; Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics, 2011, etc.) tells a shocking story of Nazi efforts to infiltrate America. He focuses on Leon L. Lewis, a Los Angeles attorney who created a spy ring to infiltrate and undermine Nazi groups and faced widespread anti-Semitism throughout the country and in government. Nazis set their sights on the film industry, which they saw as dominated by Jews. Their plans included killing prominent entertainers, including Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Charlie Chaplin, and movie heads Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner. They proposed public executions of Jews and a plan to drop cyanide into an acid solution that would be blown into Jewish homes and synagogues to exterminate Jews—“like rats, that is the way to get rid of them,” announced a Nazi leader. When Lewis solicited government support and funding for his operation, he was met with a mixed response: anti-Semites abounded there, too, and the FBI and newly created House Un-American Activities Committee were concerned more with routing out communists than in dealing with the Nazi threat. Movie executives contributed to Lewis’ efforts but at the same time wanted to ensure that Germany would remain a strong outlet for their films. “However much they may have hated the German consul and the Hitler regime,” Ross writes, “the movie moguls had to cooperate with both if they wished to remain in the German market.” To halt production of one movie he deemed “detrimental to German prestige,” the consul summoned German actors and threatened them with harm to family members living in Germany if they appeared in it. Ross puts his experience in film history to good use, and he creates lively portraits of the men and women whom Lewis recruited as spies and who succeeded in putting some dangerous Nazis behind bars.
A vivid history of homegrown resistance.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62040-562-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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