Stunning.
One of the boldest contributions to the history of the Holocaust in the last decade.
Zuccotti (The Holocaust, The French, and the Jews, 1993) presents what will surely be a most controversial study examining the steps Pope Pius XII took to help Italian Jews during the Holocaust—and concluding that his efforts were, in fact, very slight. There has been, of course, a long and very vocal debate about the Pope’s role during the war years. No one disputes that he did not speak out or publicly criticize Hitler for his extermination policy, but the Pope’s defenders claim he wasn’t indifferent or anti-Semitic—he was simply a savvy strategist. Behind the scenes in Italy, these defenders say, Pius XII saved thousands of Jews, and had he angered Hitler with public criticisms he would have been rendered powerless to help anyone. Zuccotti maintains that these defenders are dead wrong: the Pope did nothing to help the Jews. While many Catholics certainly did hide Jews, they were not acting on some secret directive of the Pope. The best the author can say of Pius XII is that he had some inkling that some Italian monks and nuns were harboring Jews, and, though he cautioned them to prudence, he did not stop them. Nor will she let the Pope off the hook on grounds that he was ignorant: in a chapter entitled “What the Pope Knew About the Holocaust,” Zuccotti claims that the Vatican knew “enough about the Jewish genocide to believe and understand that it was a disaster of immense, unprecedented proportions.” The author succeeds remarkably, not only in her thorough research but in her utter evenhandedness: never emotional, never ideological, she simply lays out her case and lets it speak—or remain silent—for itself.
Stunning.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-300-08487-0
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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 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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