An expert and highly disheartening history of a dictator’s early rise.
A sharply focused study of the many poor decisions that ended with Hitler's taking power.
German journalists Barth and Friedrichs deliver a day-to-day chronicle of events from Nov. 17, 1932, when the cabinet concluded that Germany needed a government of “national aggregation,” until Jan. 30, 1933, when Hitler became chancellor. Depression-era elections vaulted the Nazis from an obscure fringe into the largest party in the republic, but few paid attention when a journalist wrote, “fifty thousand Bolsheviks made the Russian revolution….Five hundred thousand Fascists put Mussolini in power in Italy. Adolf Hitler has a possible twelve million voters behind the National Socialist Party in Germany. How long can the life of the German republic last?” Worsening unemployment and violence between left and right stirred fears of a civil war, which would have overwhelmed Germany’s army, kept small by the Treaty of Versailles. President Paul von Hindenburg considered the Nazis vulgar riffraff, but not all fellow conservatives agreed. After an inconclusive early November election, Chancellor Franz von Papen wanted the Nazis to join a coalition government, but Hitler refused any office besides chancellor. Von Papen then resigned, and Hindenburg appointed the defense minister, Gen. Kurt von Schleicher. Still close to the president and yearning to regain power, von Papen worked hard to frustrate Schleicher while appealing for Nazi support. Hitler refused to budge, and in January, von Papen convinced himself that he could control Hitler. He agreed to serve under him as vice-chancellor and persuaded Hindenburg to make the appointments. It was a mistake. In this meticulously researched narrative, the authors emphasize that stupidity, not destiny, led to the Third Reich. Hitler’s party could never win a majority in free elections, and many high-ranking Nazis, yearning for power, were on the verge of rebellion due to Hitler’s refusal to join the government. A left-center coalition offered hope, but the Communists took orders from Stalin, who hated rival leftist parties and forbade it.
An expert and highly disheartening history of a dictator’s early rise.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-333-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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