An idiosyncratic work striving for sense and meaning from a family record of enormous loss and obfuscation.
A personal attempt to tackle emotionally the Nazi roundup of a 3-year-old relative to the concentration camps.
An American Jew whose family escaped the Nazi death machine when another branch of the family did not, Ripp (Pizza in Pushkin Square: What Russians Think About Americans and the American Way of Life, 1990, etc.) resolved to visit European Holocaust memorials in order to garner a visceral sense of what they expressed—and what they were unable to express. The death of his young cousin Alexandre Ripp, in Auschwitz in 1942, followed his “arrest” with his grandmother in Paris in July 1942 (“arrested suggests more force than needed to take a three-year-old into custody”). This served as a poignant reminder that the branch of the family in Berlin with money, the Kahans, was able to emigrate before the Nazis got them, while the working-class Ripps, namely Alexandre’s father, Aron, born in Grodno, Poland, and relocated to Paris, were relegated to hiding and eventual execution. The author visited many Holocaust memorials in Europe—35, he claims—many off the beaten path in Poland and Austria, and he is not easily impressed by the good intentions of famous artists. Above all, the author craved a “personal connection” to the memorials, a sense of being moved intimately and outside the institutional setting. “You have to find your proper place in the particular stretch of history that the memorial invokes,” writes Ripp. “Tenuously connected or deeply involved, it doesn’t matter which, as long as you are honest.” His father had come from Grodno, and his memories of the Poles were not generous; the author often scrutinizes and suspects his handlers and translators along the route for being emotionally expedient. Overall, his memoir is prickly and selective, occasionally haphazard, yet he maintains an emotional honestly above all.
An idiosyncratic work striving for sense and meaning from a family record of enormous loss and obfuscation.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-86547-833-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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