A sensational reinterpretation of the evidence surrounding the death of Adolf Hitler. Thomas is a forensic expert who practices and teaches surgery in Great Britain. Here he proposes a radically different scenario concerning Hitler's death. For 50 years, most of the world has accepted the account offered by Hugh Trevor-Roper in The Last Days of Hitler: Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in the depths of the Berlin bunker, their bodies were taken outside by aides and set ablaze. The Soviets then arrived and took possession of the remains. Thomas challenges many of these points. He first offers a diagnosis of Hitler and concludes that the FÅhrer was suffering from the advanced stages of Parkinson's disease and showed signs of a personality disorder—probably schizophrenia. Of course, the diagnosis suffers from the fact that the physician is rendering judgment 50 years later, based on second-hand observations. But this section is the stronger part of the book. Thomas goes on to insist that the female body found in the bunker was not that of Eva Braun but a double. The ``corpse'' of Martin Borman, Hitler's personal secretary, was similarly misidentified, permitting Borman to escape to South America. The most startling and sensational claim is that Hitler did not commit suicide but was strangled by one of his servants. Thomas goes to great lengths to support his theory that an elaborate forensic fraud has been perpetrated, initially by Germans to preserve Hitler's heroic image and supported by British and Soviet intelligence. There are long passages on dental records and on how the body decomposes; yet for all its scientific objectivity, the account can offer no proof that Thomas's alternative scenario is the truth. ``Revisionist'' history without the proof; a story as entertaining, and as solid, as the supermarket tabloids. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14018-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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