Adds fresh color and texture to the evolving, increasingly detailed portrait of der Führer.
Ryback (The Last Survivor, 1999) investigates the reading habits of a man better known for burning books than collecting them.
Hitler owned some 16,000 volumes contained in private libraries at three separate residences, the author notes. Ryback examines the two principal surviving portions, the larger at the Library of Congress, the other at Brown University. Arranging the chapters chronologically, he takes us through Hitler’s reading interests from World War I until the night before his suicide, speculating that in those final hours he might have read from Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great, a favorite historical figure. Hitler liked to read biographies of powerful men and books about the military; he owned a copy of Theodore Roosevelt’s account of the Spanish-American War. He enjoyed thrillers and the Westerns of bestselling German author Karl May. Naturally, he favored titles that celebrated Aryans and their apparent superiority, including philosophical tracts; Fichte was a favorite. He had several collections of photographs, given to him, and fondly inscribed by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Ryback also provides a useful account of Hitler’s own literary ambitions. He discusses the composition and publication of Mein Kampf, noting its “vacuous intellectual content and its painfully flawed grammar,” and he assesses a damaged 324-page typescript that is all that remains of a manuscript dealing with Germany’s role in the world. The author tries to extract as much significance as he can from Hitler’s textual marks, but this is an uncertain and perhaps even pointless pursuit, since it’s not always clear who made the marks. Ryback notes more definitively the influences of writers Julius Friedrich Lehmann and Maximilian Riedel. An afterword properly credits Philipp Gassert and Daniel S. Mattern’s scholarly The Hitler Library (2001) as a “road map” for his own work.
Adds fresh color and texture to the evolving, increasingly detailed portrait of der Führer.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4204-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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