Entertaining WWII minutia.
The seemingly unrelated stories of three World War II–era figures who “embellish[ed] their biographies with exotic tales of adventure.”
Buruma’s subjects didn’t know each other, had little influence on history, looked after their own interests in occupied nations, and lied about it afterward. The author, who has written numerous books about this era, notes that “none of the three was utterly depraved. They were all too human, especially in their frailties. Similar frailties can be seen in many figures strutting around the public sphere today.” Having spent perhaps too much effort justifying the significance of his subjects, he proceeds to write an enjoyable book that will appeal to WWII buffs. Felix Kersten (1898-1962) spent World War I in the German army, ending the war in Finland, where he studied physical therapy before moving to Berlin. A charismatic figure, he grew wealthy as a practitioner of healing massage, serving many highly placed figures, including Heinrich Himmler. Safely ensconced in Sweden after the war, he proclaimed (and a gullible biographer agreed) that he had used his influence to save anti-Nazis and Jews. Buruma expresses understandable skepticism. In Holland, which was decimated by the Nazis, Friedrich Weinreb (1910-1988) survived by convincing them that he could find Jews in hiding while also collecting money from Jews with the false promise of keeping them from deportation. He served three years in prison, but, an aggressive self-promoter, he later convinced many that he was a hero of the resistance scapegoated by the establishment. Perhaps the most bizarre of the trio was Kawashima Yoshiko (c. 1906-1948), daughter of a Chinese aristocrat who gave her up for adoption to a Japanese official. Raised and educated in Japan, she was a flamboyant figure who dressed in men’s clothes and whose aggressive support of that nation’s conquests in Manchuria and China made her a popular figure in Japanese media during the 1930s. She sat out the years after Pearl Harbor in Beijing, after which a vengeful Chinese government executed her for treason.
Entertaining WWII minutia.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780593296646
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.
A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.
Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798228309890
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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