Startlingly prescient words from a moral crusader during a perilous time.
The edited journals of a fearless anti-Nazi philosophy professor and theologian in Munich reveal exceptionally brave activism and resistance.
A young convert to Catholicism, von Hildebrand (1889-1977) was the son of the neoclassical German sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand and grew up in Italy before studying philosophy at the University of Munich, where he became a professor in 1919. In this memoir, written in the late 1950s and substantially edited and translated by Crosby and the team at the Hildebrand Project, he recounts his increasingly outspoken views about the rise of Nazism, which he believed was fundamentally opposed to Christianity. In his chronicles from 1921 to 1937, he delineates his growing alarm at the rise and violence of the Nazis and their tenets of nationalism, militarism, collectivism and anti-Semitism—views he openly expressed at conventions among his fellow Catholic theologians, who were frequently on the side of appeasement and collaboration. After Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, von Hildebrand was horrified to realize that “Bavaria had fallen into the hands of criminals,” and he also expressed what he saw as a deeply anti-aesthetic ideology of the Nazis: “a flat, gloomy and incredibly trivial world, a barren and ignorant mindset.” At the time, von Hildebrand’s students were impressed by his “intuitive power,” yet once Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, von Hildebrand realized he could not stay in Germany without making moral compromises. With his wife and son, he fled to Vienna, where he cultivated relationships with like-minded leaders such as Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrian chancellor who resisted the Anschluss and agreed to help von Hildebrand start an anti-Nazi journal devoted to “the battle against antipersonalism and totalitarianism.” From Vienna, he and his family eventually fled to Toulouse, France, then New York in 1940. Crosby also includes several of von Hildebrand’s stringent essays from the 1930s.
Startlingly prescient words from a moral crusader during a perilous time.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0385347518
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Image/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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