A necessary book for those who study dictators.
Goeschel (Modern European History/Univ. of Manchester; Suicide in Nazi Germany, 2009) examines the strained relationship—never a true friendship—between the two dictators.
Both Hitler and Mussolini served as corporals in World War I, and both seized power through brutal violence and apparently legal political activity. Their “new order” was based on replacing the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles. Both were anti-Bolshevik and anti-Jewish. While anti-Semitism was central to Hitler’s ideology, Mussolini believed in a strategy of racial exclusion, not extermination. Mussolini was a strategic model for the rise of Nazism as the driving force behind the attempt to reshape postwar politics and diplomacy. In Italy, the monarchy and papacy were maintained, curtailing a complete dictatorship, a fact that Hitler often criticized. Curiously, Hitler was the instigator of the alliance, which wasn’t signed until well after World War II began. As the author demonstrates, the relationship was never ideological; it was politically constructed and contained little substance. Tensions were constant, not only between the dictators, but also their nations; few Germans could forget that Italy deserted their alliance and fought against them. The rivalry manifested itself at all of the meetings, which were really about image. Hitler quickly dropped his hero worship of Mussolini and, as an all-powerful dictator, monopolized their short conversations and made the decisions. Mussolini doggedly pursued his goal to become the “determining weight” in the Mediterranean and continued to foster Italy’s détente with England, hedging his bets with brinkmanship and opportunism. Hitler’s method of diplomacy was to completely skip the bureaucratic machinations, make backdoor deals, and put every nation’s fate in his own hands. The author methodically follows the meetings through the years, from great shows of power and exorbitant expenditures to the secretive meetings at Wolf’s Lair late in the war, which were no more than summons to Mussolini to receive Hitler’s instructions. Ultimately, Goeschel skillfully exposes the relationship as that of two men who merely tolerated each other to amass power.
A necessary book for those who study dictators.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-17883-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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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