An important testimony that will refute anyone who denies the reality of the Nazi crimes.
A companion volume to the PBS documentary (scheduled for broadcast in May 2000), providing a transcription of 27
videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses. The interviewees recorded their testimonies for the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University beginning in 1979. Greene (an award-winning film producer) and Kumar (who conducts "television ethics" seminars) cut the separate interviews into short passages and presented them over several chronological chapters. A polished and eloquent foreword by Lawrence Langer (English/Simmons Coll.) exhorts us not to romanticize the will or resistance of the survivors, who had a traumatic but distinctly "unheroic experience." The corroboration of the details of particular events (death marches, for example) or general experiences (such as the day-to-day living conditions in the camps) by both survivors and witnesses is remarkable, and it endows the collection with a tremendous historical importance. It is a disappointment, then, to find last names omitted from the credits of the interviewees, as this tends to blunt the otherwise sharp realism of the project as a whole. Furthermore, and for the same reason, the absence of many of the dates and place names is a serious oversight. While some of the split-screen excerpts are jarringly short (one German Jew appears only long enough to say he rooted for Germany in the 1936 Olympics), most of the pieces fit together as a kind of mosaic depicting prewar Europe, the ghettos, life underground, deportations, the camps, the liberation, and (in the last chapter) the after-effects of the war. While most of the reportage is not new, there are important confirmations of anecdotal accounts (of cannibalism among Soviet prisoners, for example), and many of the statements (such as Joseph K."s description of the ghetto as worse than the camps because "there was the constant fear of something happening to my family") offer sharp psychological insights. References allow contributors to be accessed on video and provide extensive lists for further reading on the subject.
An important testimony that will refute anyone who denies the reality of the Nazi crimes.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86525-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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