by Peter Longerich ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 19, 2015
Longerich’s book is overly long and even plodding, but it is essential: it paints a definitive portrait of a man whose name...
Thoroughly researched, massive biography of one of the chief powers behind Hitler’s throne.
It is perhaps literature’s loss, but certainly humankind’s, that Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) abandoned his attempts to make a living as a writer and instead attached himself to the firebrand-cum-spectacle Hitler. As Goebbels, in an early, mawkish piece, wrote, “All modern artists…are to a greater or lesser degree insane—like all of us who have active minds.” As is his custom, Longerich (Modern German History/Royal Holloway Univ. of London; Heinrich Himmler: A Life, 2012) draws on psychology to characterize Goebbels as a classic narcissist, though one of real ability and accomplishment. He may not have been a first-rate writer, but he had a sharp mind and a strong sense of resolve, all of which he put to use as the Nazi state’s chief propagandist. In the first third of the book, the author charts the development of that ideology and the growing connection between Hitler and Goebbels, a friendship that suffered from tensions that haunted the lieutenant. As he wrote in 1934, “Führer does not call at supper time. We have the feeling that somebody is influencing him against us. We are both very pained by it. Go to bed with a heavy heart.” Hitler must have had other things on his mind, and though often slighted, Goebbels proved a loyal assistant. Of particular interest is Longerich’s account, late in the book, of efforts among Hitler’s chief aides to forge separate peace treaties with the soon-to-be-victorious Allies, with Goebbels angling for a concord with the Soviets. Close though Goebbels was to Hitler, he was never able to present the proposal, and the Nazis continued to wage a ruinous two-front war. A schemer and masterful manipulator, in short, Goebbels was seldom able to sway the chief object of his attention.
Longerich’s book is overly long and even plodding, but it is essential: it paints a definitive portrait of a man whose name has become a byword for complicit evil, and deservedly so.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1400067510
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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by Peter Longerich ; translated by Lesley Sharpe & Jeremy Noakes
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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...
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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