So how did Hitler convince his generals to invade Russia and his subjects to ignore the genocide around them? This readable,...
A searching study that addresses the question, not why so many Germans and Austrians accommodated Adolf Hitler, but why they so ardently embraced him.
Fresh from the news that the Nazi labor- and death-camp system was much more widespread and widely known than hitherto thought, British historian Rees (World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West, 2009, etc.) examines Hitler’s career through a Max Weber–ian perspective of charisma, noting that Hitler promised not just decent wages and orderly streets, but “broader, almost spiritual, goals of redemption and salvation.” In the end—and Rees is rightly emphatic about this—Hitler was, like any politician, willing to compromise on almost any front except his central program: the extermination of the Jews. Apologists explain away German and Austrian acquiescence to this program, but Hitler made no effort to disguise his intentions; it was his ability to sell it with impassioned speeches and to cow his opponents with popularly supported terror that won the day for him, at least for a while. Rees looks into several questions and punctures a few myths along the way: Hitler was no slouch in battle, no mere “paper-hanger,” but was a brave and selfless soldier on the World War I front (and commended with an Iron Cross by his Jewish commander), if given to “haranguing those around him about any subject that took his fancy.” He was able to gather followers among religious Germans by professing Christianity, much as he despised it. He rose to power at a time when Germans were begging for an authoritarian figure to solve their economic woes, and though he had a propaganda chief, he himself was one of the best propagandists in history.
So how did Hitler convince his generals to invade Russia and his subjects to ignore the genocide around them? This readable, fascinating book, a worthy addition to the vast literature surrounding Hitler, has plausible answers.Pub Date: April 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-37729-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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