An important contribution to the scholarly literature about one of the seminal events in European history.
Masterful analysis of the conditions Jews faced in the allied countries before and during World War II.
In his eminently readable account, Hamerow (History Emeritus/Univ. of Wisconsin; Remembering a Vanished World: A Jewish Childhood in Interwar Poland, 2001, etc.) describes how Jewish communities in parts of Western Europe and the United States reacted—and often turned a blind eye—to the growing fascist threat against their co-religionists. Relying heavily on demographic and economic data, the author is balanced and never polemical. Cultural differences caused some Jews in Western Europe and America to resist allowing more immigration from Germany and Eastern Europe, he argues, and worsening economic conditions caused people to fear admitting newcomers who would compete for already scarce jobs. Chronicling the changing nature of anti-Semitism, the author notes that in earlier periods, especially before the French Revolution, it was subtler: “The ups and downs of official policy regarding the Jewish community reflected expediency, indecisiveness and sometimes simply indifference rather than a deep-seated hostility.” By the time of the Holocaust, however, attitudes toward Jews had changed, and the governments and citizens of many European countries were looking for a more drastic solution to the Jewish “problem.” Examining how the Holocaust is perceived in modern society, both in academic and popular venues, Hamerow notes that while Americans generally consider it “the unparalleled atrocity of the twentieth century,” Old World denizens are more inclined to lump it with the sufferings of others under Nazi rule. Though his lengthy narrative occasionally goes off on tangents, for the most part it moves at a brisk pace. Scholarly enough to appeal to academics, it will also find an audience with general history buffs. The story Hamerow tells is unequivocally sad, but he ends with an optimistic assessment of the current state of Jewry.
An important contribution to the scholarly literature about one of the seminal events in European history.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06462-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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