A dramatically and philosophically enthralling tale.
In Peterson’s (The Girl From Copenhagen, 2018) historical novel, a childhood acquaintance of Adolf Hitler later becomes a baker with a lucrative but ultimately dangerous business strategy.
When Josef Putkamer first meets Hitler as a child in 1900, they’re classmates in Leonding, Austria, and the latter already bears the marks of a future tyrant. He intimidates Putkamer into parting with his lunch money daily, and, eventually, Putkamer placates him with pastries purloined from his baker father’s shop. Hitler is “incredibly selfish” and “generally fearless,” Putkamer notes in the first-person narration, as well as a cruel prankster who’s incapable of empathy. He’s also a staunch admirer of former German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and already believes that he has a great destiny. The two boys eventually part ways, and Putkamer, years later, takes over his father’s bakery and opens another in Munich. There, he’s reunited with Hitler, who’s become an angry political agitator, trying to make a name for himself. Putkamer, at the request of his new pastry chef and wife, Freya Krause, caters to the growing Nazi market as a business strategy—the customers “were suckers for anything with a swastika on it,” he notes. By 1935, his business is so successful that he opens a third store in Berlin, becoming the distinguished owner of multiple “Nazi-themed bakeries.” Peterson imaginatively conjures the evolution of Hitler’s maniacal psyche, showing the lust for power that’s evident from his earliest years. But the protagonist, Putkamer, is the book’s most intriguing aspect—a man who proclaims himself apolitical yet pins his business’s hopes on the ascendancy of a murderous political party. The character also marries an unrepentant admirer of all things Nazi; after one lovemaking session, she’s thrilled that they “made love on the same bed upon which Ernst Röhm and his young men pleasured themselves.” The narrator’s indifference to the tumultuous politics of the times—artfully depicted by Peterson— rises to the level of dark absurdity. The author successfully explores what German American philosopher Hannah Arendt famously called the “banality of evil”—effectively showing how bureaucrats and businessmen can contribute, without ideological fervor, to political oppression.
A dramatically and philosophically enthralling tale.Pub Date: June 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949735-97-0
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Ideopage Press Solutions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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