An illuminating view of the Führer’s nature and aims, well defended and very well illustrated.
Former American diplomat and cultural historian Spotts takes seriously Adolf Hitler’s claim that he made an art of politics and a work of art of the Nazi state.
“If I were to assess my work,” Hitler remarked in 1941, sounding the two overarching motifs of his regime, “I would first emphasize that in the face of an uncomprehending world I succeeded in making the racial idea the basis of life, and second that I made culture the driving force in German greatness.” Many historians have analyzed, to varying degrees of success, the role that Hitler’s supposed failure as an artist played in fueling his demonic rise to power. Spotts (Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival, 1994, etc.), by contrast, notes that he actually did make a living, however unsplendid, as a painter and illustrator. More than that, and with considerable depth, the author shows Hitler orchestrating mass rallies as if staging them for the theater, designing battle flags and party standards, planning model cities that would serve as grand memorials to the German genius, drawing plans for a capital that would, he fully believed, last long after the memories of suffering and bloodshed had faded—the “thousand-year Reich” of his endlessly rehearsed speeches. The singer David Bowie once remarked without apparent irony that Hitler was “one of the first great rock stars”; Spotts lends considerable historical weight to this view and ably demonstrates that whatever else the Führer may have been, he was certainly an artist of a kind, dreaming of a retirement in the Italian countryside so that he could again take up painting. Moreover, Spotts argues, Hitler was one of the greatest patrons of the arts Europe had ever known (he personally exempted artists from the draft, a privilege accorded no other category of German citizen), even though his tastes were surely less than catholic.
An illuminating view of the Führer’s nature and aims, well defended and very well illustrated.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2003
ISBN: 1-58567-345-5
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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