Companion volume to a PBS documentary on the 761st Tank Battalion, which led the Allied advance in WW II Europe and helped liberate Dachau and Buchenwald. The crux of this remarkable story isn't just the exploits of the 761st, perhaps the best battalion in Patton's Third Army. What really matters is that the 761st was all-black (with white officers) and thus represents, as portrayed here by filmmakers Miles and Rosenblum and screenwriter Potter, the triumph of courage over racism. The emotional highlight of the 761st's saga was the liberation of Jews from two of Hitler's worst concentration camps, described here as ``the coming—in the eleventh hour—of one despised and rejected people to the rescue of another.'' Given this subtext of the struggle for freedom, the writers wisely broaden their horizons and begin with an exposition of the history of black warriors in America—from the story of runaway slave Crispus Attucks up to the eve of WW II, when the US military still denied blacks any real leadership or combat positions. With the war, a crucial opportunity arose, and, thanks to the pleading of Eleanor Roosevelt and others, the 761st was born. In battle, the black tankers made history, not least when their lives intertwined with those of Jewish camp victims. The accounts of liberation are heart- rending (survivor Ben Bender: ``I was seeing black soldiers for the first time in my life, crying like babies, carrying the dead and the starved and trying to help everybody''). The 150 b&w photos included here—of black soldiers triumphant in Hitler's garden; of Buchenwald victims; of a KKK march in Washington, D.C.; of a Jim Crow sign at a bus station in North Carolina—capture the extent of this transcontinental battle for human rights and liberation from terror, and of its almost unbearable poignancy. A hitherto hidden history revealed in all its glory.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-15-151283-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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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