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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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