A revelatory look at the “gangplank for the Holocaust.”
A powerful and disturbing portrait of a devastating chapter in the history of Nazi terror.
In the fall of 1939, Hitler began a program to cleanse Germany of those he deemed “unworthy of life”—particularly individuals diagnosed with mental illness, epilepsy, “feeblemindedness,” or alcoholism or engaging in criminal or anti-social behavior, however minor. Although an extensive sterilization project already addressed the problem of procreation, Hitler preferred killing, thereby saving the nation the cost of supporting “useless” individuals. Identified by eugenicist physicians and psychiatrists, the individuals were sent to a country mansion to be gassed with carbon monoxide. The euthanasia program had begun earlier with the killing of children identified by midwives as suffering from “certain conditions, including ‘idiocy and mongolism’ (especially cases involving blindness and deafness); microencephaly; severe or progressive hydrocephalus”; or physical “malformations of any kind”; some were condemned because their parents were Jewish. About 6,000 babies were murdered, either by injection or, often, starvation. As journalist and arts editor English reveals in an absorbing contribution to the horrific history of Nazi Germany, the program that began in 1939 was complicated by Hitler’s fraught connection to art. Rejected for admission to Vienna’s stodgy Academy of Fine Arts in 1907, Hitler portrayed himself as an artist for the rest of his life, and he saw art as a potent cultural force. Not surprisingly, he vilified modernist artists—such as Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Egon Schiele—who exalted the irrational, primitive, and mad. As a prominent theme in modernist art, insanity found a champion in the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, a leading intellectual in the 1920s who saw striking works among his own mental patients. Collecting samples from asylums, he published Artistry of the Mentally Ill, a volume celebrated by modernists. Many of the artists Prinzhorn discovered—men Hitler damned as “degenerates and lunatics”—became victims in the euthanasia program, which the author trenchantly brings to life.
A revelatory look at the “gangplank for the Holocaust.”Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-51205-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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 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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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