A solid entry into the Holocaust literature, presenting stories that need to be told.
Biographies and photographs of former prisoners from the notorious Nazi camp.
Terezín was located in Czechoslovakia, annexed by Germany in March 1939. Popular histories often mention its rich cultural life, including concerts, speeches, and education classes, the result of many “prominent” Jewish people imprisoned there—but also because of the Nazi effort to spruce it up occasionally to impress the apparently easily impressed Red Cross inspectors. “Terezín would be the first and only concentration camp the International Red Cross ever inspected during the war,” writes Darling, a photographer and former professor at the University of Texas School of Journalism and Media, who shows it to be a loathsome place. Not a death factory like Auschwitz nor a permanent concentration camp like Buchenwald, Terezín was built as a temporary holding pen for Jews from German-occupied Europe. Until its liberation in May 1945, 143,000 arrived; about 90,000 “were deported to German killing centers and sites in the East.” About 35,000 died inside Terezín, mostly from starvation and disease. Initially, children were exempt from deportation and experienced better living conditions, but as the war progressed and German armies retreated, conditions in all Nazi camps deteriorated significantly. “Of the fifteen thousand children that spent time at Terezín,” writes the author, “only twelve hundred were still alive in spring 1945.” Darling provides around 75 short biographies based on his interviews, and he includes an expansive glossary at the end of the book. The author acknowledges that his book is not a comprehensive history of the camp or the time period: “My intent was simple—to make portraits and collect first-person narratives of those imprisoned there—letting each voice tell their particular piece of the Holocaust; experiences remembered from seven decades ago.”
A solid entry into the Holocaust literature, presenting stories that need to be told.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781477328163
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
HISTORY | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | HOLOCAUST | JEWISH | WORLD
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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