It’s not quite a Bridge of Spies–level thriller, but there are plenty of unexpected, entertaining twists behind bars.
The Cold War was fought by proxies, to be sure—but pandas and pangolins? An offbeat tale from the Cold War and a bestseller in Germany after its original publication in 2017.
As journalist Mohnhaupt writes in his first book translated into English, Berlin’s zoo animals, like its people, suffered terribly during World War II. After the war, in an occupied city isolated from the surrounding countryside, animals were valued even more, and two rival zoos, one in the Russian-governed eastern sector and the other in the Allied-governed west, sprang up. Over the years, each drew a steady stream of visitors—millions, in fact, and this in a (divided) city that, during the Cold War years, didn’t draw many tourists. A rivalry developed, punctuated in the opening pages by an unseemly moment between the respective zoo directors: “One word led to another, and eventually a shoving match ensued between the two aging men—neither much taller than five foot five—right there among the elephants.” The Berlin Zoo on one hand and the Tierpark on the other became the beneficiaries of an unlikely race for animal-keeping supremacy, and with plenty of near-comical turns—e.g., when the East German institution had to use capitalist shipping to send “four hyenas and six lions from its world-famous breeding center” to China in exchange for Siberian tigers. More fraught were efforts to keep elephants, the ostensible subject of the directors’ brawl, and other exotic creatures. As Mohnhaupt notes, the East German zookeeper was fierce enough to keep the Stasi away, the secret police agency reasoning, by way of face-saving, that animal lovers were harmless. Meanwhile, his West German counterpart was shrewd at corralling huge sums of money that eventually made the Berlin Zoo “the world’s most biodiverse.” Reunification did little to stem the rivalry at first, writes the author, though the turf war has since simmered down.
It’s not quite a Bridge of Spies–level thriller, but there are plenty of unexpected, entertaining twists behind bars.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8849-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
HISTORY | NATURE | 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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