A ponderous, tedious, and scurrilously misleading biography of a major Nazi leader—by a fellow traveler, if not a card-carrying member, of the movement of Holocaust denial. With access to some 75,000 pages of Goebbels's diaries, which had long been spirited away in Soviet archives, British author Irving (Gîring: A Biography, 1989; Hitler's War, 1977; etc.) had the unprecedented opportunity to gain insight into the mind of Hitler's minister of propaganda. Instead, Irving inundates the reader with the personal foibles (including amorous liaisons and a love for cars) of a rather mediocre intellect and with a blizzard of details that, along some selective omissions, obscure the truth rather than shed light on it. Some of the details insinuate that the Jews brought on themselves such events as Kristallnacht; others seek to rehabilitate Hitler's reputation. Whatever happened to the Jews in WW II (and Irving doesn't state clearly what did happen) was the doing of Goebbels and Hitler's other henchmen. ``Goebbels was the motor, goading his reluctant FÅhrer into ever more radical actions against the Jews.'' And: ``Neither the broad German public nor their FÅhrer shared his [Goebbels's] satanic antisemitism.'' (For a different view of the German people, see a genuinely revisionist piece of history, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, p. 195.) Irving lectures for the Institute for Historical Review, a center of Holocaust denial in this country, and has been banned from entering Germany and Canada, among other countries, because of his Holocaust denial. But here Irving is more cunning than to blatantly state that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. He simply says that the death camp was ``the most brutal of all Himmler's slave-labor camps and the one with the highest mortality rate''—glossing over the corpses and the memory of 6,000,000 dead. These twisted interpretations of the leader of the Third Reich and his crimes do not deserve to be called history. (Military History Book Club main selection)
Pub Date: May 23, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14211-0
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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