Fascinating and infuriating corrective to the American mythology of the “Good War.”
Outraged account of how the Cold War created an entree for thousands of ardent Nazis to reinvent themselves as Americans.
Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times Washington bureau investigative reporter Lichtblau (Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice, 2008) writes in an urgent, pulpy style, appropriate to his shadowy tale of “America’s decades of resolute indifference to the Nazis in its backyard.” He deftly manages a rough chronological structure that demonstrates how American views on war criminals fluctuated wildly over time. Beginning with spy chief Allen Dulles’ covert 1945 meeting with the top SS general in Italy, efforts were made on behalf of well-connected Nazis, including the CIA’s “Paperclip” program for top scientists and the “rat line” to South America maintained by anti-Semitic Catholic clergy. Many fugitives worked as anti-communist provocateurs for the CIA during the 1950s, while in the ’60s, J. Edgar Hoover “had no interest in having his agents wasting their time tracking down supposed Nazis in America.” But by the ’70s, owing to efforts by a few crusading journalists and immigration investigators, “Nazis in America were suddenly a hot topic.” The turning point was the 1979 establishment of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which aggressively pursued aging Nazis, like renowned scientist Arthur Rudolph, who’d overseen the V-2 rocket program. Yet with success came backlash; amazingly, the Reagan White House provided Pat Buchanan a platform to attack the investigations and Holocaust research generally. Lichtblau builds suspense by focusing on the long-term fates of individuals like Tom Soobzokov, a power broker among New Jersey Eastern Europeans before being outed as a brutal collaborator; he pushed back aggressively against his accusers and was ultimately killed in a mysterious pipe bombing. Lichtblau utilizes obscure sources and declassified files, tenaciously circling back to a dark reality: Many of the estimated 10,000 Nazis who settled here were involved in the worst aspects of the Holocaust.
Fascinating and infuriating corrective to the American mythology of the “Good War.”Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0547669199
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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