An eerily engaging life’s work by a dogged researcher that adds materially to the Holocaust documentation.
A chilling biography of the terrifying doctor who led a charmed life through the Nazi ranks—and eluded justice for decades.
“In 1985,” writes Marwell, “while working in the Office of Special Investigations at the U.S. Department of Justice, I was assigned to the international investigation to locate Mengele and bring him before a court of law.” Though the author, the former director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, explores Mengele’s life and experiments at Auschwitz, he concentrates on his postwar flight and his ability to resist detection as a war criminal and reinvent himself in South America—a journey largely funded by his family’s manufacturing firm back in Germany. Trained in Germany’s finest schools, Mengele became a medical doctor with an intense interest in anthropology and racial science, and he was influenced by the prominent anthropologist Theodor Mollison, who focused on “racial science.” At the infamous Frankfurt Institute in the late 1930s, Mengele’s dissertation on the heritability of oral clefts “served to underpin” the Nazi legislation enforcing sterilization to prevent “diseased offspring,” resulting in 375,000 forced sterilizations. As World War II intensified, Mengele transitioned from scientist to soldier and became a combat physician. After experiencing “extreme brutality” with the SS Viking Division, he was transferred to Auschwitz in May 1943. There, he conducted scientific experiments with “unprecedented resources,” which allowed him to “surmount the barriers that traditional medical ethics and basic humanity placed in his way.” His heinous experiments are well documented, as are his movements in the final days of the war and afterward. How did it take so long to find such a highly ranked Nazi war criminal who had reestablished his name in 1956 in Argentina and resumed practicing medicine? Marwell engrossingly describes the capture process as highly political, involving American, Israeli, and German government groups. He ends with an account of the unsettling visit (revealed in letters) by Mengele’s son to see his unrepentant father in 1977.
An eerily engaging life’s work by a dogged researcher that adds materially to the Holocaust documentation.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-393-60953-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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
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
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