Worth reading, but only with your willing suspension of disbelief fully engaged.
A strange foray into the history of the Third Reich that posits skullduggery and conspiracy in the matter of the SS leader’s celebrated suicide.
Himmler supposedly killed himself on May 23, 1945, after having been captured by British soldiers. There were two post-mortem examinations, both to establish proof of the cause of death (cyanide poisoning) and identity of the deceased and, in intelligence agent Kim Philby’s words, to “lay to rest the ghost of a live Himmler.” Nonsense, says forensic expert Thomas (The Murder of Adolf Hitler, 1996): the body pictured in the newsreels was not Himmler’s, but that of a lieutenant. What happened to the real article? Well, Thomas continues, British and American intelligence allowed him to slip underground as part of a complex deal that effectively granted him immunity from prosecution; Himmler went on to control the “Fourth Reich” (the Nazi regime in South American exile) while perhaps continuing to live in Germany. This argument, largely in the absence of evidence (the British government will not open its files on Himmler until 2045), is intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying. Somewhat better grounded is Thomas’s account of how Himmler, recognizing a couple of years before the fact that the Nazi cause was lost, prepared himself for a comfortable postwar future by stripping their treasury of millions on millions of Reichmarks, some of which he squirreled away in a secret Swiss bank that, among other things, had earlier invested funds from the British royal family in the Nazi war effort. The author adds that Himmler also attempted to better his position with the Allies, with whom he was secretly negotiating, by suspending the extermination of Jews for a time, though the “vacillating, panicky” Nazi later rescinded the order. These are large and controversial claims, and likely to be subject to intense scholarly scrutiny.
Worth reading, but only with your willing suspension of disbelief fully engaged.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28923-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
Novelist See's (Golden Days, 1986, etc.) Dreaming is a searing memoir about drinking: about her family's relationship with alcohol—eventually, with drugs as well—and, more generally, about middle-class America's long love affair with intoxication. This clear-eyed anatomy of how addiction spreads across the generations is not for the faint-hearted. It probes painful regions of the soul that continue to obsess troubled Americans. It not only offers no cure, it offers no final argument against or for liquor. The first part of her memoir is the most compelling. See opens dramatically, painting an idyllic California backyard landscape in which a mother is beating a child. It is her mother, beating her. Exercising her considerable novelistic talents See vividly recreates her youth. She captures her mother's manifest alcoholic misery and her father's cheerful manner of masking his depression; the impact on all concerned of their divorce; and her stepparents' fascinating characters. See's own early marriages dissolve in liquor and dope-fueled scenes, as she and her father begin to move in an expertly outlined hippie milieu. See's sister Rose, meanwhile, long tortured by their mother, disappears into the wilderness of the drug culture. See devotes much space to transcribing Rose's experiences. These prove absorbing enough, but not quite in sync with See's own, despite what a late chapter title calls ``the embarrassing Californianness [sic] of it all.'' The bad times that See describes follow the patterns that obsess recovery movements (in fact, her father and stepmother were early AA adherents), but she refuses to let go of the good times, instead working heroically to cultivate a broad perspective that encompasses both. At a key moment, See claims that ``the second most boring thing in the world after people bending your ear about dreams is people bending your ear about their acid trips.'' But thankfully, with a resolute ``nevertheless!'' she tells of dreams, drinks, and trips all—proving herself exceptional for her brave storytelling, if not for her sobriety. Not the great American novel she and others in her family aspired to write—but a book that will nevertheless forever change how many of its readers imagine whatever the American dream might be.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43026-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author of a gritty portrait of an NYPD homicide detective (Close Pursuit, 1986) offers an equally vivid close-up of a US Army noncom before, during, and after the Gulf War. While Stroud focuses on Master Sergeant Dee Crane, a lifer whose MOS (military occupational specialty) is 11B (combat infantryman), he leaves himself plenty of room for maneuver. In recounting how his unmarried protagonist (blooded in Vietnam during the mid-1960s) preps young all-volunteer troops for deployment to Saudi Arabia, for example, Stroud moves backward and forward in time to provide historical perspectives on Crane's outfit, the 1st Division (a.k.a. The Big Red One), which has distinguished itself on battlefields from the Argonne Forest to the Kasserina Pass. He also touches on the horrific allure of combat, careerism in the Army's upper echelons, and the factors that prevent a long-serving professional like Crane from accepting, let alone pursuing, a commission. For the most part, however, Stroud's engrossing narrative is designed to illustrate how the brotherhood of sergeants—hard but not altogether hardened men plying a violent, demanding trade—constitutes the heart and soul of an armed force. Dragooned by his captain into a press conference on the eve of battle, Crane sets the record straight in grimly hilarious fashion on subjects as varied as casualties, the evolving role of women at or near the front, and the job of a soldier (``...to close with [the enemy] and kill him''). Though in the thick of the fighting, Crane and his inexperienced but well-trained men all make it home. At the close, nearing 50 and facing enforced retirement, the universal noncom takes cold comfort from the knowledge he has been ``a part of some great thing.'' A profane, like-it-is, and oddly elegiac take on close encounters of the enlisted man's kind that rings true throughout.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09552-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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