Bøger af Frank Sanello

Fractured History Tales or Why (Almost) Everything You Thought You Knew About the Past Never Happened

In "Victims and Victimizer: Gays and Lesbians in the Third Reich," historian and novelist Frank Sanello ("The Opium Wars," "The Knights Templars, "Invisible People: History's Homosexuals Unhidden") explores the life and times of gays and lesbians in Weimar and Nazi Germany. From the Anything Goes Roaring Twenties of trés gay Berlin, where a gay think tank stood across the street from the Reichskänzlerei, the German White House, to the pink triangles of detention camps turned death camps, Sanello investigates a terrifying time in history to be gay and German. Homosexuals thrived in pre-Nazi Germany and may have been more accepted than anywhere else in the world - until Hitler came to power in 1933. From there, gays and lesbians who couldn't or wouldn't escape paid the ultimate penalty for their decision to remain in a country that hated them, if possible, more than its Jews.

"To Kill a King" is a nonfiction compilation about the gallons of blue blood that have been spilled throughout history. The author reports little-known details about famous and obscure royal victims and offers theories about the murderers' motivations despite royalty's semi-divine status as God's anointed representatives on earth. Just one of many compelling examples to be found in "To Kill a King": Gen. MacArthur's advisors urged him not to prosecute or execute Emperor Hirohito for war crimes because the Japanese ruler was considered a living god by his subjects. It was feared that the emperor's execution would have had the same effect as "crucifying Jesus Christ" in the West and cause riots, complicating America's occupation of Japan after World War II.

In his new novel, Frank Sanello vividly recreates the Third Reich and World War II as seen through the eyes and daily diary of Hitler's imaginary wife, Countess Christina Bernadotte (1916-1948). The granddaughter of the king of Sweden, the countess is forced at the age of 16 to marry the 43-year-old Nazi dictator by her socially ambitious and abusive mother, an heiress to the Vanderbilt fortune. Her husband, strung out on morphine and cocaine, makes revolting sexual demands on his virginal wife involving coprophilia, a fetish that eroticizes feces. Lonely and isolated, Frau Hitler throws herself into a series of transient love affairs with the Third Reich's handsome foreign minister, the corrupt Joachim von Ribbentrop, Cary Grant, and Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA (Storm Troopers). Because of her many romantic liaisons, she doesn't know the identity of the father of her son, Folke, except that he's not her husband's. As the Holocaust claims more victims, Christina begins smuggling Jews out of Germany right under her drug-addled husband's nose. During the war, she travels to Auschwitz to rescue Jewish friends and bribes the Gestapo to allow other Jews to flee Nazi Germany. With her uncle, Count Folke Bernadotte, she helps organize the White Buses operation, a dangerous mission that transports 30,000 Jews and POWs to safety in Sweden aboard Red Cross buses painted white to avoid bombing the Allies or the Luftwaffe. As First Lady of the Reich, she meets or corresponds with various historical figures such as Sigmund Freud, Pope Pius XII and MGM chief Louis B. Mayer. Toward the end of the war, as she tries to flee home to Sweden with her son and adopted daughter, her arch-nemesis, Hermann Göring, Hitler's second in command and pedophile, forces her to choose one of her children to leave behind with him. The choice haunts the countess until tragedy intervenes during her work as UN mediator between warring Palestinian Jews and Arabs in 1948. These dramatic events are recorded in her daily diary, which her grandson finds hidden in a Holocaust memorial library and publishes as "The Autobiography of Frau Adolf Hitler."

Famous homosexuals of the past and why historians ignore or hide them

All too often, highly fictionalized cinematic depictions of the past are accepted as the unassailable truth by those unfamiliar with the "e;real"e; account. This book profiles sixty movies that portray actual moments in history, and compares the mythologized account of each event to what really happened. Movies chronicled include The Ten Commandments, Spartacus, A Man for All Seasons, Gladiator, Gandhi, Apollo 13, The Thin Red Line, Dances with Wolves, Braveheart, The Last Emperor, All the Presidents Men, Mutiny on the Bounty, Gone with the Wind, Bonnie & Clyde, Patton, and Elizabeth. Sanello also contrasts several historical figures with their filmed treatments, including Julius Caesar, Henry V, Christopher Columbus, Joan of Arc, Sir Thomas More, Jesus Christ, Catherine the Great, Sigmund Freud, and Harry Houdini. Lavishly illustrated with sixty film stills, Reel v. Real shows how a happening's genuine details are frequently reshaped and distorted by Hollywood's bottomless appetite for over-the-top flamboyance and melodrama.

Based on more than a half dozen interviews with the director himself, this unauthorized biography recounts Spielberg's childhood, education, career, philanthropic and charitable endeavors, and his extremely private personal life. This updated edition explores Spielberg's latest filmmaking efforts, from Schindler's List to Men in Black 2.

Gives a vivid description about how the Templars were formed as a strict religious-military order, how they got the political and financial power beyond the military power, and their passed down legends.