Despite a dearth of material, the authors deliver a chilling, well-researched biography that opens a whole new window on the...
The story of the man who set the mold for Adolf Hitler; both were delusional, megalomaniacal, irrational, and brilliant propagandists.
Brownell (So Close to Greatness: The Biography of William C. Bullitt, 1988) and Drace-Brownell introduce us to one of history’s most fearsome and least-known characters. Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937) helped lead the German army in World War I; victories were rousingly reported and losses rarely mentioned, even to the kaiser. Though the authors describe Ludendorff as a man without a shadow, impossible to fathom, a biographer’s nightmare, they successfully describe this beast of a man. He hated Jews and swore Germany would build a world empire. He had no friends and was rude to everyone, including the kaiser; he was effectively a dictator whom no one dared question. A short war required a speedy conquest of France before turning on Russia, foreshadowing World War II. The authors stress that the war was lost early on, stalled by the Belgians. In 1916, there was a chance for a compromise peace, but Ludendorff refused to accept anything but complete victory, convincing gullible Germans of their greatness while doubling causalities. The authors amply demonstrate the absurdity of some of his wild plots, none of which featured reasoned or workable strategies. Allowing Lenin to return to Russia changed world history, but it was useless in freeing up troops who were needed to enforce his draconian peace. He never really had a Plan B and never took responsibility for his failures. He invented the stab-in-the-back legend that Germany lost because of the Jews, and he swore that the “next war” would see them gassed just as his troops had been. Hitler and Ludendorff had similar philosophies, identical fanaticism, a strong belief in the German superman, and a desire to eliminate the Jews.
Despite a dearth of material, the authors deliver a chilling, well-researched biography that opens a whole new window on the world wars and the German psyche at the time.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61902-609-4
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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