A provocative, urgent history with significant lessons for today.
How did Adolf Hitler, an obvious extremist, con a nation into backing him? This historical essay answers the question, to often unsettling effect.
Hett (History/Hunter Coll.; Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery, 2013) observes that, by design, Hitler entered the German government with only two of his fellow Nazis holding cabinet-level positions. He wanted to appear powerless, it seems, and to give the impression that the right-wingers who had put him into office, who “sought to take advantage of Hitler’s demagogic gifts and mass following to advance their own agenda,” were actually in control of the situation. In the context of the Weimar Republic, whose system of representational democracy inadvertently splintered any organized resistance, Hitler was able to build an effective right-wing alliance that, in time, caused liberals to wonder whether democracy itself might be to blame if someone like Hitler could gain votes. It was “monstrous,” one Berlin paper wrote, that so large a portion of the electorate had supported “the commonest, hollowest and crudest charlatanism,” even as establishment conservatives bridled at having to work with what Paul von Hindenburg called “the Bohemian private”—but did so anyway. One constitutional crisis later, in the form of the burning of the Reichstag—the work, very likely, of the stormtroopers themselves—and democracy was suspended, the fate of the Jews and political opponents effectively settled, and war practically inevitable. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch to find uncomfortable historical parallels in the current political scene, and Hett, though careful to support each of his assertions with scholarship, doesn’t shy away from those possibilities. In the end, he writes, what won Hitler his power was the assent of the disaffected, who forgave him his sins and excesses in the hope that he would provide for them “the fastest and easiest solutions to their own particular problems.”
A provocative, urgent history with significant lessons for today.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-16250-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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