bookshelf

THEN THEY CAME FOR ME

Name: THEN THEY CAME FOR ME
Author: Matthew D. Hockenos
ISBN: 978-0-465-09786-9

MARTIN NIEMÖLLER, THE PASTOR WHO DEFIED THE NAZIS

by Matthew D. Hockenos ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 2018

The writing lacks flair, but Niemöller’s story is a valuable study in individual resistance to tyranny.

bookshelf

The tale of German pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), whose writings have become central documents of liberation theology.

The title of this sometimes-plodding but useful biography derives from Niemöller’s most famous writing, a poem that includes the lines “first they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist….Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” As Hockenos (Twentieth Century History/Skidmore Coll.; A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past, 2004) chronicles in the serviceable narrative, Niemöller was a man of contradictions: He commanded a submarine in World War I and was so embittered by Germany’s loss that he refused to deliver his vessel to the Allies to be scrapped. Though a pastor who joined the clergy so that “he could serve God and country with little worry about interference from the state,” he was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler and the Nazi regime. That changed when Hitler decided to turn the Protestant church in Germany into a Nazified extension of the state; Niemöller objected to the policy but not to National Socialism itself, even as he organized resistance to the Nazified church. He was imprisoned and sent to Dachau, and though treated better than most political prisoners, he would almost certainly have been murdered at the end of the war had his SS jailers not decided to “use their valuable cargo to negotiate their own survival.” By a curious twist, Niemöller was saved from the SS by members of the regular German army, who knew that defeat was at hand. His political evolution occurred after the war, when he condemned anti-Semitism and became a civil rights activist and confidant of Martin Luther King’s. “More and more in the 1950s and ’60s,” writes Hockenos, “he began to draw connections between pacifism, anticolonialism, and racial justice.”

The writing lacks flair, but Niemöller’s story is a valuable study in individual resistance to tyranny.

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-465-09786-9

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018

Categories:

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

bookshelf

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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.