Admirably thorough and packed with facts, though often arid and mired in specifics. Readers may wish for a shorter, more...
Exhaustive—and sometimes exhausting—life of the Nazi functionary who rivaled Adolf Hitler in power and influence.
In disfavor for the last couple of decades, psychohistory finds a champion in Longerich (Modern German History/Royal Holloway University of London; Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, 2010, etc.), who puts Heinrich Himmler on the couch and finds in him a bundle of neuroses, including attachment disorder: “People who suffer from this kind of dysfunction acquired in early childhood frequently tend, while growing up and as adults, to attach very high expectations to personal relationships, though they cannot define these expectations precisely, and as a result they cannot be fulfilled.” Be that as it may, and cold fish though Himmler was, he was methodical in building and maintaining his personal power. Weak and sickly, he nonetheless became commandant of Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the “protection squad,” building it from a small and elite guard into an organization to rival the size and power of the regular Wehrmacht, or army. Indeed, writes the author, one of the leaders of the attempted assassination of Hitler in 1944 reckoned “that a coup was unavoidable if the army were not to be at the mercy of the SS in the short or long term.” Longerich credits Himmler with helping develop the misty Teutonic mythology that provided the mythic basis of the regime and the white-knight image of the SS. He also demonstrates, ably but in sometimes narrative-crushing detail, that Himmler was skilled in reading the signs of the growing radicalization of the regime and getting there first, adapting the SS every couple of years to changing conditions. Himmler was also adept at keeping his skin even while incurring Hitler’s disfavor at times—especially at the end of the war, when he attempted to bargain his way, using Jews as pawns, into a separate accommodation with the advancing Allies.
Admirably thorough and packed with facts, though often arid and mired in specifics. Readers may wish for a shorter, more pointed treatment, but, psychologizing aside, students of World War II will likely find this the last word on its immediate subject.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-19-959232-6
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
