Posner (Mengele, 1986; The Warlord's Crime, 1988) spent a long time searching for the offspring of some of Hitler's henchmen. Despite meeting angry rebuffs, he did find some who would reveal what it was like to grow up in a Nazi family; here, skillfully edited and reported, are their stories. Almost every chapter dwells on one of the Nazi elite as seen from the vantage point of a child. One is startled to read a description of a mass-murdering Nazi leader as a ``loving father.'' Wolfe Hess defends his father Rudolf as a ``man of peace'' who was wrongfully imprisoned and murdered by his Allied guards; Hans Frank, the ``Butcher of Poland,'' is condemned by one son but admired by another; the gross egotist Goering is still beloved by his daughter Edda; and children of Mengele—the ``Angel of Death'' of Auschwitz—and of Donitz (Hitler's successor) and others appear unrepentant while remembering the glory days of the Third Reich as the ``good time.'' The only uplifting narrative is the portrait of the brave and highly gifted aristocrat Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a cultured soldier who led the failed attempt on Hitler's life and who was executed as a traitor to Nazi Germany. He is revered in his children's memory as a heroic and humane father. Though adding little to the historical record, Posner's absorbing human-interest sketches speak clearly of the deep emotional reactions of those who must bear their terrible burdens of inherited guilt.
Pub Date: May 13, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-58299-3
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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.
Atlantic senior 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
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
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