A skillful, persuasive blend of history and polemic, sure to incite controversy and to earn its author much attention.
Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) may have “unwittingly provoked a moral uproar,” but there’s nothing unwitting about this provocative work, an unblinking consideration of the role of Catholic doctrine in the machinery of the Holocaust.
Goldhagen’s debut, angrily debated in Germany and elsewhere, dismissed the notion that the Germans and other Europeans were “herdlike, simply frightened, optionless people,” incapable of opposing or even comprehending Hitler’s savage war against the Jews. Here, he extends his argument to show that much of Catholic (and, by extension, other Christian churches’) doctrine provided justification for that war in the eyes of its faithful perpetrators. For centuries, after all, priests had been preaching that the Jews were the tainted murderers of Christ and “an insufferable devilish burden,” and few earlier bloodlettings had been without the blessings of popes and prelates; small wonder, then, that although German bishops protested the state’s euthanasia program against the ill and infirm, they never publicly spoke against the elimination of their Jewish compatriots. Extending with better evidence the arguments of John Cornwell and other recent scholars, Goldhagen sheds particularly harsh light on Pope Pius XII, who suppressed his immediate predecessor’s encyclical condemning Nazi anti-Semitism and professed a “special love” for Germany as against a special hatred for the godless Bolshevism that he suspected the Jews of spreading; Pius, he adds, knew all about the gas chambers and yet lent the Church’s support to Italy’s consent to the deportation of its own Jewish population as late as 1943. The Church must acknowledge its complicity in the Holocaust, insists Goldhagen. Moreover, he adds, “if the Catholic Church is to undo the harm it has produced, then it must work assiduously to combat, to reduce, and to teach people the falseness and, in its terms, the sinfulness of anti-Semitism”—a hateful doctrine whose origins lie in New Testament passages depicting Jews as “a brood of vipers” and worse.
A skillful, persuasive blend of history and polemic, sure to incite controversy and to earn its author much attention.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41434-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist’s sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative.
A fresh, urbane history of the dramatic and melodramatic belle epoque.
When Barnes (The Only Story, 2018, etc.), winner of the Man Booker Prize and many other literary awards, first saw John Singer Sargent’s striking portrait of Dr. Samuel Pozzi—handsome, “virile, yet slender,” dressed in a sumptuous scarlet coat—he was intrigued by a figure he had not yet encountered in his readings about 19th-century France. The wall label revealed that Pozzi was a gynecologist; a magazine article called him “not only the father of French gynecology, but also a confirmed sex addict who routinely attempted to seduce his female patients.” The paradox of healer and exploiter posed an alluring mystery that Barnes was eager to investigate. Pozzi, he discovered, succeeded in his amorous affairs as much as in his acclaimed career. “I have never met a man as seductive as Pozzi,” the arrogant Count Robert de Montesquiou recalled; Pozzi was a “man of rare good sense and rare good taste,” “filled with knowledge and purpose” as well as “grace and charm.” The author’s portrait, as admiring as Sargent’s, depicts a “hospitable, generous” man, “rich by marriage, clubbable, inquisitive, cultured and well travelled,” and brilliant. The cosmopolitan Pozzi, his supercilious friend Montesquiou, and “gentle, whimsical” Edmond de Polignac are central characters in Barnes’ irreverent, gossipy, sparkling history of the belle epoque, “a time of vast wealth for the wealthy, of social power for the aristocracy, of uncontrolled and intricate snobbery, of headlong colonial ambition, of artistic patronage, and of duels whose scale of violence often reflected personal irascibility more than offended honor.” Dueling, writes the author, “was not just the highest form of sport, it also required the highest form of manliness.” Barnes peoples his history with a spirited cast of characters, including Sargent and Whistler, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt (who adored Pozzi), Henry James and Proust, Pozzi’s diarist daughter, Catherine, and unhappy wife, Therese, and scores more.
Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist’s sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65877-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
It took 14 years to build and it cost 15 million dollars and the lives of 20 workmen. Like the Atlantic cable and the Suez Canal it was a gigantic embodiment in steel and concrete of the Age of Enterprise. McCullough's outsized biography of the bridge attempts to capture in one majestic sweep the full glory of the achievement but the story sags mightily in the middle. True, the Roeblings, father and son who served successively as Chief Engineer, are cast in a heroic mold. True, too, the vital statistics of the bridge are formidable. But despite diligent efforts by the author the details of the construction work — from sinking the caissons, to underground blasting, stringing of cables and pouring of cement — will crush the determination of all but the most indomitable reader. To make matters worse, McCullough dutifully struggles through the administrative history of the Brooklyn Bridge Company which financed and contracted for the project with the help of the Tweed Machine and various Brooklyn bosses who profited handsomely amid continuous allegations of kickbacks and mismanagement of funds. He succeeds in evoking the venality and crass materialism of the epoch but once again the details — like the 3,515 miles of steel wire in each cable — are tiresome and ultimately entangling. Workmanlike and thorough though it is, McCullough's history of the bridge has more bulk than stature.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1972
ISBN: 0743217373
Page Count: 652
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1972
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