A detailed, well-constructed biography of a Nazi mass murderer and his escape from justice.
A biography of a little-known but major 20th-century war criminal.
Lawyer and historian Sands tells the fascinating, disturbing story of Otto Wächter (1901-1949), a high-ranking official in the SS. In 2012, while researching the Holocaust in Ukraine, the author learned that Wächter’s son, Horst (b. 1939), was still alive. Since his father served as Nazi governor of Ukraine from 1942 to 1944, where he supervised the murders of Jews and other Soviet civilians, Sands sought a meeting. Although convinced that his father was a “good Nazi,” Horst maintained a close friendship with the author for years, meeting many times and allowing access to a massive trove of family correspondence, journals, and photographs. Born in Austria, Wächter entered the University of Vienna in 1919. He became a member of the fiercely anti-Semitic, pan-German Deutsche Klub and participated in violent anti-Semitic demonstrations. An “early supporter of Adolf Hitler,” he joined the Austrian National Socialist Party in 1923. A prominent Austrian Nazi by the 1930s, he fled to Germany in 1934 after an unsuccessful coup. Welcomed into the SS, he returned to Vienna after the 1938 Anschluss. During the war, he served in several top-level positions but made his mark in Ukraine. After Germany’s surrender in 1945, he disappeared. This event doesn’t occur until 130 pages into the narrative, but readers will not complain. Adding Horst’s archives to extensive interviews allows Sands to deliver a gripping account of Otto’s experience. For three years, he lived in an Alpine cabin supplied by his wife and friendly locals. Then, to escape discovery, he joined the “Ratline,” a route used by Nazis to flee to South America. When he arrived in Rome, sympathetic monks provided him with a small room. After less than three months, before he could acquire money and documents for immigration, he fell ill and died. The list of principal characters is helpful.
A detailed, well-constructed biography of a Nazi mass murderer and his escape from justice.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-52096-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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