A curious study of fleshly weakness and the will to survive—and a representation certain to yield controversy.
A troubling portrait of an iconic figure of the Holocaust and his sad, secretive life during and after the Nazi era.
Lee, a biographer of Otto’s daughter (Roses from the Earth, not reviewed, etc.) and associate of the Anne Frank Trust, brings due sympathy to bear on Otto, a German Jew who had served with distinction in the Kaiser’s army, succeeded in business, but was forced out of Nazi Germany into neighboring Holland. There he established a spice-importing firm, some of whose employees were members of the Dutch Nazi Party—many Netherlanders, Lee writes, were glad to join the crusade to purge Europe of Jews; whereas the survival rate for French Jews was something like 75 percent, only 25 percent of those in the Netherlands saw the fall of the Nazi regime. A Dutch Nazi acquaintance of one of those employees began to blackmail Otto, and for a time he kept the knowledge of Frank’s secret annex to himself until someone—Lee has a strong opinion on who that was—phoned the Gestapo to betray the Frank family. Amazingly, the blackmail resumed after the war and Otto’s relocation to Switzerland. What was the basis of thug Tonny Ahlers’s hold over Otto? Lee suggests that it had to do with Frank’s collaboration with the occupying Wehrmacht, to which he sold pectin and other materiel; adultery may have figured into the matter, too, for Ahlers’s acquaintance suspected that his wife had been having an affair with Frank. Lee does not condemn Frank, though she points to some strange choices he made while editing his daughter’s famous diaries for publication, as well as his approval of a German translation that altered lines such as “only the language of civilized people may be spoken, thus no German” to “all civilized languages . . . but softly!”—all of which brought Frank fortune, and Ahlers too.
A curious study of fleshly weakness and the will to survive—and a representation certain to yield controversy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052082-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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