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A GOOD GERMAN

ADAM VON TROTT ZU SOLZ

A close look into Hitler's Germany via the life of aristocratic anti-Nazi Adam von Trott zu Solz, by British historian MacDonogh. Handsome, highly intelligent, and principled, Trott (1909-44) was born to make his mark. As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and part of the flourishing German/English culture of the time, he was both a social success and accepted by distinguished scholars like A.L. Rowse. MacDonogh looks at Trott's life via personal letters from and to his friends, comments by those friends, and descriptions of his behavior and basic concerns. The finely detailed narrative creates an impressive, tactile reality, making clear what it was like for Trott to be torn between love of country and knowledge of its corruption, unable to affect its course. Trott certainly tried to do just that, though, using his talents and connections to work from within the Third Reich—and in so doing lost many of those closest to him, Britons who could not forgive him for remaining at home. Trott rose to become an emissary of Hitler's Germany, dissembling at home, distrusted abroad, his proposals compromised into impossibility, his life poisoned, a tortured man, and at times an apologist. (Trott's stand on the Jews is ambivalent—he grew close to a half-Jewish British woman but seemed unable to grasp what was happening in Germany.) What to do when your country is bent on genocide and war? Whatever else he did, Trott remained very human, marrying the woman he loved and having children. In the end, all his cards played without effect, Trott joined the bomb plot against Hitler and died for his beliefs. A fine biography and an evocative portrait of Trott's times. (Twenty-eight b&w photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: April 8, 1992

ISBN: 0-87951-449-3

Page Count: 358

Publisher: Overlook

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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