A monumental biography that seeks to be the final word (at least for this century) on the subject. British historian Kershaw (Univ. of Sheffield) has spent an academic career thinking judiciously and writing clearly about Hitler, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany. This massive work, which will consist of two volumes, promises to be the most comprehensive biography of Hitler to date. And although the writing is clear and mercifully free of far-fetched theories attempting to fathom Hitler’s evil, it still takes some dedication to historical truth to finish such a work and realize that the story is only half told. This is epic history on a grand scale; from rural Austria and Vienna to Munich and cosmopolitan Berlin; from the battlefields of the Great War to the exaggerations of the beer hall; from Hitler’s rejection by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna to his election as chancellor of Germany. As narrative biography, Kershaw— account clearly portrays how Hitler evolved from a rejected artist to a political novice and then to messianic illusion. Besides the use of Goebbels’s diaries, recently discovered in Moscow, there is little that is new here; Kershaw’s achievement lies in his retelling the tale in greater detail and avoiding some of the more outlandish theories concerning Hitler. No one writing on Hitler, though, can avoid some attempt at explanation. Kershaw writes—and few would argue—that “the First World War made Hitler possible,” but goes on to argue against the interpretation that Hitler was somehow the logical outcome of German history’s “special path.” Kershaw’s Hitler is no —psychopathic god— but deeply rooted in the history and vulture of Vienna, the Great War, and German racial nationalism. Thus, what emerges is a fascinating dialectic between the socioeconomic causes of Hitler’s rise and the responsibility of the German people for his reign of terror. (32 pages b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04671-0
Page Count: 875
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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