Packed with the tangled, riveting detail of the many cases, this is more sensational reading than astute legal analysis—but...
A detailed look at the grim work of tracking Nazis over the decades since World War II.
Formerly the Hong Kong bureau chief for Newsweek, Nagorski (Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, 2012, etc.) has interviewed some of the protagonists in this long journey to bring to justice Nazis still at large—e.g., former Austrian secretary general of the U.N., Kurt Waldheim, evidence of whose former work for the Wehrmacht in the Balkans emerged during his run for Austrian president in 1986. Nagorski tracks how the initial quest for vengeance on the captured Nazis by the victors gave way to the Allied (specifically American) insistence that establishing a historical record in a public trial was as important as punishing the guilty. The author emphasizes the little-known military trial held at Dachau on Nov. 13, 1945, just prior to the International Military Tribunal held at Nuremberg, featuring the effectively low-key chief prosecutor William Denson, who established that the SS officers of the camp were part of a “common design” to commit criminal acts in a “machinery of extermination,” and thus it was not necessary to prove specific crimes committed by each. Subsequent trials, such as at Nuremberg, relied on the incriminating documents of the Germans themselves rather than eyewitness accounts such as those used by Denson. While the apprehension, trial, and execution of actual Nazis only skimmed the surface, the whole process, as Nagorski notes, functioned as a symbolic act of reckoning. It forced the German public to assimilate the chilling, technical details of those running the camps when interest in the trials began to flag in the 1950s. Simon Wiesenthal, Mossad chief Isser Harel, Jan Sehn, and Elizabeth Holtzman, among others, were instrumental in tracking notorious criminals like Adolf Eichmann and Klaus Barbie to the finish. At the beginning of the book, the author provides a helpful list of the “hunters” and the “hunted.”
Packed with the tangled, riveting detail of the many cases, this is more sensational reading than astute legal analysis—but absorbing nonetheless.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7186-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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