Timely, given the increase in right-wing intransigence throughout the world, and one of the best works on Hitler and the...
“Everything is happening exactly as we predicted.” So exulted Adolf Hitler in his salad days, before he brought the world tumbling down around him.
Will there ever be an end to books about the Nazi dictator? Not as long as there are new documents to be released from the archives. Longtime students of the literature surrounding the Third Reich will find no surprises here, but journalist/historian Ullrich’s primary audience is a generation of readers of German who have no direct knowledge of events, making it a thorough but eminently readable introduction to the receding past. The author deals with the usual turns, such as Hitler’s rough years as an aspiring artist and the horrors of trench warfare in World War I, but he adds welcome observations and interesting asides along the way. Irrespective of the musings of Allied soldiers on the subject, for instance, he suggests that Hitler enjoyed a normal if perhaps not exciting physical relationship with Eva Braun. Of less prurient interest, Ullrich details the careful unfolding of the Nazi plan to isolate—extermination will come later in this two-volume biography—the Jews of Europe, which accelerated beyond the original timetable because “rapidly pursuing anti-Jewish persecution does no harm to the system [and] does not cause any economic difficulties or any loss of prestige in the world at large,” in the words of one contemporary. Hitler, writes the author, was in fact keenly sensitive to public opinion, as revealed in the wake of the discovery that a senior military officer had married a onetime prostitute, when Hitler lamented, “if a German field marshal can marry a whore then anything is possible in this world.” Above all, in this long but skillfully narrated study, Ullrich reveals Hitler to have been an eminently practical politician—and frighteningly so.
Timely, given the increase in right-wing intransigence throughout the world, and one of the best works on Hitler and the origins of the Third Reich to appear in recent years.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35438-7
Page Count: 1008
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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
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
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