An authoritative study of a deeply flawed and tragic figure of history.
Another close scrutiny of the pope excoriated for his silence during World War II and no nearer to redemption.
Ventresca (History/King’s University Coll.; From Fascism to Democracy: Culture and Politics in the Italian Election of 1948, 2004, etc.) does a thorough job sifting through the evidence of the complicated life and papacy of Pius XII, while keeping an open mind to the conclusion. Was the condemnation of the wartime pope as uncaring and remote at a time when Jews and others were being exterminated across Europe really justified? Indeed, Ventresca’s laborious examination of evidence makes for painful reading. Eugenio Pacelli was the first Roman chosen as pope in a good century: Hailing from the “black nobility,” meaning, for generations his family had been employed by the Holy See and thus insiders, he was first appointed by Pius XI as his secretary of state, known for his probity and capacity for hard work. His early posts to Munich and Berlin put him at the center of shattering world events, and he developed certain biases that would influence his decisions during the rest of his life, namely his hatred of Bolshevism (and Jews were often viewed as indistinguishable from the revolutionary leaders). Moreover, during his influential time in Berlin, he took up key German advisers who would continually dissuade him from public denunciations of the government, while his 40-year household employment of the autocratic and frequently resented Mother Pascalina set an alarming tone. Cerebral, diplomatic and shortsighted, Pius XII simply could not overcome his habitual discretion and propriety in grasping the gravity of Nazi misery, all of which he was informed about early on. Ventresca’s study damns him as a man mired in the conventions of his time.
An authoritative study of a deeply flawed and tragic figure of history.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-674-04961-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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
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