A masterfully narrated story of how a democracy committed suicide, with lessons for today.
An expert account of the dizzying months when Hitler solidified his power in Germany.
Some readers may be shocked when Ryback, author of Hitler’s Private Library and The Last Survivor, points out that Hitler’s assumption of absolute power was executed legally. His failed 1923 coup made him famous as a hypernationalistic right-wing fanatic, one of many in post–World War I Germany. His brown shirts were thugs, and his rhetoric was hateful, but the National Socialists became a legitimate political party, participating in elections throughout the 1920s and winning a few seats until the devastating Depression, after which membership exploded. Ryback begins his riveting account in July 1932, when the party won 37% of the vote, making Hitler a legitimate candidate for chancellor. Germany’s conservative establishment included national icon Paul von Hindenburg, who was president, a position that held the power to appoint the chancellor. All shared Hitler’s hatred of communism, the Treaty of Versailles, and the “haggling and compromise” essential to “weak-kneed democracies.” Hitler enjoyed scattered conservative support, but most were put off by his fanaticism and his followers’ savagery. Hindenburg disliked him and, in a painful August interview, announced that he would not be appointed. Of course, this infuriated Hitler, and readers curious to learn his ultimately successful tactics may be shocked that he simply went on as before, with equal fanaticism. His Nazis did not tone down their violence, and the times worked in his favor. Germany was a mess, with rampant unemployment and a wildly unpopular government. The fear of a communist revolution, far more than right-wing vulgarity, obsessed conservatives. No more rational than Hitler, in early 1933, they convinced themselves that they were clever enough to control Hitler as chancellor. Everyone knows how that turned out.
A masterfully narrated story of how a democracy committed suicide, with lessons for today.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593537428
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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