An informative coffee table book for film buffs and those interested in Jewish history.
The story behind the making of Schindler’s List and the development of a foundation dedicated to sharing Holocaust testimonies.
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the foundation and the film, this commemorative work is divided into two sections. After an introduction from Steven Spielberg, the first part recounts the process of making Schindler’s List. The material in this section is wide-ranging and includes an account of the maturation process of Spielberg’s directorial ability, the chance encounter that sparked the book behind the movie, certain cinematographic techniques utilized in the film and the experience of having Holocaust survivors visiting the movie set in Poland. The Schindlerjuden, “Schindler Jews,” interacting with the cast and crew inspired Spielberg to initiate the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which works from the premise that the “last act of genocide is always denial and silence”; the foundation collects and catalogs oral histories of the Holocaust. The second part of the book discusses the process of building, developing and expanding this foundation. Initially, Spielberg aimed for narratives from 50,000 Holocaust survivors and rescue-worker witnesses. However, once that goal was reached and exceeded, the foundation used these testimonies in their production of documentaries. More recently, this foundation, which grew out of a desire to ensure that the Holocaust will never happen again, expanded into collecting accounts from the Armenian, Rwandan and Cambodian genocides. With the connection to USC, these eyewitness stories serve as educational tools that will elicit the strong emotive response necessary for the prevention of future attempts at genocide. This general history of the film and the foundation has a promotional feel as it also discusses exciting new technological directions for the foundation.
An informative coffee table book for film buffs and those interested in Jewish history.Pub Date: March 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-228518-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Newmarket Press for It Books/Harpercollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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