Here's the answer to those who have wondered whether Shirer's veiled allusions on the air, speaking from Berlin, have cloaked pro-Nazi sympathies. Here's the message between and behind the lines. Here is as thrilling and vigorous and all-inclusive a denunciation of Germany, her leaders, her policies, her people, her actions, her purposes as has come in any book we have read. Millions have listened to Shirer, who, during seven years, has been on the ground at the crucial moment — the fall of Austria, of Czecho-Slovakia, of Poland. He and his devoted friend, Edward Murrow, have been jointly responsible for the policies that have brought international hook-ups to the place they hold. This diary shows an amazing comprehension of what has been happening, before the world realized it; his advice would have saved many missteps had diplomats and statesmen heeded him. The record suffers not at all by a sense of having been told before, since Shirer presents it all with fresh evidence, a human approach, and the intimate details that make one feel one has gone through it with him. Sell the book as an important link in understanding what has been happening, as preparation for what is still to happen. Sell it as absorbingly interesting reading, throughout its close to seven hundred pages. Often enough his prophetic insight has proved itself. What can he do for the future ahead? A book for public libraries, bookshops, rental libraries.
Pub Date: June 20, 1941
ISBN: 0801870569
Page Count: 652
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1941
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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