Bessel ably shows why such thinking is incorrect, and how the Nazi regime was able to secure so much support in its project...
“Nazism was inseparable from war”: not a novel thesis, but brightly defended here.
From the start, Adolf Hitler and his “band of political gangsters, inspired by a crude racist ideology,” made no secret of their desire to go to war. One cause was to avenge the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary in WWI, which helped induce economic ruin and political chaos, as well as inspire the sense that the politicians had stabbed the army in the back. Ten million German veterans were able to vote after the war, and they voted far right. Apart from Hitler and a few of his comrades, however, most Nazis had had no direct experience of the war; quoting memoirist Sebastian Haffner, Bessel (History/Univ. of York) observes that “the truly Nazi generation” was born after 1900 and saw WWI as a great game. Inexperience notwithstanding, the Nazis also pushed a war in the East meant to secure “living room,” destroy Bolshevism, and annihilate the Jews and other supposed lesser peoples. Thus, on coming to power, the Nazi leadership put the German economy on war footing: “For Hitler, the economy was not primarily an arena for generating wealth, but one for providing the hardware required for military conquest, and the determination to rearm underlay all the regime’s economic policies.” Against some leftist historians, however, Bessel posits that the Nazi regime was not a tool of big business: “It would be mistaken to conclude,” he writes, “that the underlying logic of Nazism was unbridled capitalist exploitation,” adding that Hitler rejected free-market ideology and accommodated capitalism as a useful pawn, just as practical-minded capitalists with Germany began formally preparing for defeat as early as 1943. It took Germany decades to face the past, Bessel writes, and because its enemies committed extreme violence, too, Germans could think of themselves as victims, as people to be “pitied rather than reviled.”
Bessel ably shows why such thinking is incorrect, and how the Nazi regime was able to secure so much support in its project of total war.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-64094-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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