A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition.
Penetrating biographies of Hitler and 21 other Germans who played important roles in Nazi-era atrocities.
Evans, author of the Third Reich Trilogy and other acclaimed books of German history, offers these eye-opening portraits of the heart of evil in an effort to understand what kind of people fell under Hitler’s spell. The subjects include the “Paladins,” top Nazis such as Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels; “Enforcers,” such as Rudolf Hess, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann; and “Instruments,” including filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and military officer Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb. “What had happened to their moral compass?” asks the author in this robust historical investigation. “Were they gangsters acting with criminal intent?” Were they “ordinary Germans” or “deviants” of some kind? Seeking answers, Evans thoroughly examines each of his subjects’ early years, their reasons for joining the Nazi party, what they did in the war years, and their postwar fates. Common denominators include a desire to find someone to blame for the loss of World War I and for the Great Depression, as well as the belief that a strong leader could return Germany to its rightful place in the world. Tellingly, few ever showed remorse for their deeds. Hitler’s virulent antisemitism and his charismatic speaking style combined with ruthless opportunism to bring him to power, even though the Nazis never attained a majority of the electorate in a fair election. Hitler’s delusion that Germany could fight three much larger powers—the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the U.S.—was widely shared among Germans, though its effects were exacerbated by their leader’s constant overruling of his generals and the derangement of his later years. The author avoids drawing parallels to any current political figures or movements.
A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780593296424
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 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.
