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
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.
A firsthand account of how the Navajo language was used to help defeat the Japanese in World War II.
At the age of 17, Nez (an English name assigned to him in kindergarten) volunteered for the Marines just months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Growing up in a traditional Navajo community, he became fluent in English, his second language, in government-run boarding schools. The author writes that he wanted to serve his country and explore “the possibilities and opportunities offered out there in the larger world.” Because he was bilingual, he was one of the original 29 “code talkers” selected to develop a secret, unbreakable code based on the Navajo language, which was to be used for battlefield military communications on the Pacific front. Because the Navajo language is tonal and unwritten, it is extremely difficult for a non-native speaker to learn. The code created an alphabet based on English words such as ant for “A,” which were then translated into its Navajo equivalent. On the battlefield, Navajo code talkers would use voice transmissions over the radio, spoken in Navajo to convey secret information. Nez writes movingly about the hard-fought battles waged by the Marines to recapture Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and others, in which he and his fellow code talkers played a crucial role. He situates his wartime experiences in the context of his life before the war, growing up on a sheep farm, and after when he worked for the VA and raised a family in New Mexico. Although he had hoped to make his family proud of his wartime role, until 1968 the code was classified and he was sworn to silence. He sums up his life “as better than he could ever have expected,” and looks back with pride on the part he played in “a new, triumphant oral and written [Navajo] tradition,” his culture's contribution to victory.
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-425-24423-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
Gioia, musician and critic, winner of the ASCAPDeems Taylor Award for The Imperfect Art (not reviewed) takes on a daunting task, tracing the history of jazz from preCivil War New Orleans to the embattled music of today—and does a creditable job of it. Jazz's history has been written by entirely too many mythographers and polemicists. Gioia, mercifully, spares us the myths and polemics. ``The Africanization of American music,'' as he calls it, begins farther back in American history than New Orleans's aptly named Storyville red-light district around the turn of the century; he starts his narrative in the slave market of the city's Congo Square in 1819, and when it comes to Storyville, he offers hard facts to puncture the picturesque racism that finds jazz's roots in the whorehouses of New Orleans. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Gioia's account is the sociohistorical insights it offers, albeit occasionally as throwaway sidelights, such as his observation about drumming as an avatar of regimentation more than of freedom. He is particularly good in explaining how the music was disseminated and shaped by new technologies—the player piano, the phonograph, radio. He is also excellent at drawing a portrait of a musician's style in short brushstrokes. His prose is for the most part fluid and even graceful (although his metaphors do get a bit strained at times, as in his comparison of Don Redman's ``jagged, pointillistic'' arrangement of ``The Whiteman Stomp'' and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). Although Gioia is much too generous to jazz-rock fusion of the '70s and '80s and probably gives more space than necessary to white dance bands like the Casa Loma orchestra, if you wanted to introduce someone to jazz with a single book, this would be a good choice. (9 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-19-509081-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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