by Alfred Andersch & translated by Michael Hulse ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 28, 2004
A small gem: still brilliantly alive and relevant.
Intimate reflections from one of postwar Germany’s most admired novelists (Winterspelt, 1978, etc.) on life under Hitler and, in the act of deserting an army at war, his own profound emancipation.
Though controversial when first published in Germany in 1952 (the German government has never formally pardoned Wehrmacht deserters), current readers may wonder what fascination remains in ruminations on the Third Reich by a writer who, while a giant by his countrymen’s standards, had very little work circulated in English. Hulse’s foreword effectively piques curiosity, however, noting that Andersch’s force as a stylist is what transcends an undercurrent of compromise—he divorced his Jewish wife at her peril in 1943—that dogged even an admiring biographer. Andersch glosses over that incident but not his father’s (a WWI hero) Nazi connections as instrumental in getting him out of the Dachau concentration camp after being arrested as a Communist Party organizer in 1933. Though fluent in reflection on Communism’s futile agenda, Andersch would not forget the Nazis who “made the struggle of my youth meaningless and made an introvert of me.” Called into service twice during the war, Andersch finds himself an infantryman in Italy in 1944 with an almost comic-opera opportunity to desert. Therein lies, of course, a moral dilemma, resolved with the author’s achieving a conviction that no human being should be beholden to any system that requires following all orders without question. “All I had was the aesthetics of my art and my private life,” he writes, “and these they destroyed by calling me up. Take up arms—for them? Even to entertain the notion was an absurdity.” But persuade others to desert as well? “No,” says Andersch with searing finality, “I did not love my comrades in arms.”
A small gem: still brilliantly alive and relevant.Pub Date: June 28, 2004
ISBN: 1-59264-052-4
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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