Stark renderings that go beyond simple aesthetic judgment produced by some of the artists who perished in concentration...
A visual testament to the horrors of Nazi cruelty is revived a generation after it first appeared.
Nonagenarian Benvenuti, a poet, critic, and scholar, hated the Nazis who moved into his native Italy. During the war, he “was tempted by the resistance movement,” though not enough to join it. After the war, provoked by conscience, he compiled a volume containing a few hundred depictions of the Holocaust, in black and white, by artists who were nearly all captive victims of Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, and other concentration camps. Included was famous illustrator Feliks Topolski, who was present at the liberation of some camps; his works were presented as evidence at Nuremberg. Benvenuti’s book, first issued in a limited edition in 1983 featuring a foreword by Primo Levi (included here), was titled KZ, a German—and Yiddish—abbreviation for “concentration camp” or “internee.” The author, whom Levi calls “an observant and devout man, sensitive to the past and the present,” has added a handful of poems to the present edition. The images are arranged alphabetically by artist, a few well-known, most not. There are many portraits of hollow-eyed, gaunt prisoners, multiple scenes of guards at their work, several views of hangings, and scores of drawings of the skeletal dead and dying. Such works are beyond the now-banal pop depictions that increasingly displace firsthand witness. Collections like this may help inform a growing generation that knows nothing of the Holocaust or its lessons, but this is not the only place where such art may be found. Many of the same images are quite nicely reproduced in Janet Blatter’s Art of the Holocaust, published in 1981.
Stark renderings that go beyond simple aesthetic judgment produced by some of the artists who perished in concentration camps.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-0666-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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