provided here.
A useful introduction to the roots of Hitler's ideas concerning the Jews and the German people, combined with a reductionist
analysis of the psychology of the F?hrer and the German masses. Gonen (A Psychohistory of Zionism, not reviewed) is most informative when delving into the roots of Hitler's "leadership principle" or speculating on the biological origins of Nazi anti-Semitism. He stumbles badly, however, in supplying a number of dubious psychoanalyses of the dictator and those who followed him. He argues, for instance, that Hitler's advocacy of Lebensraum for the German nation in a 1937 speech actually reflected his doubts that he could achieve such a goal. But the excerpt from the speech that Gonen quotes doesn't reflect such misgivings at all, leading Gonen to engage in some psychological double-talk: "the denial of any doubts smacked too much of an affirmation through negation, that is, betraying the deeply hidden doubts by allowing the subject to be only mentioned within the context of total denial." Statements such as these can neither be proved nor refuted, and they depend totally upon the reader's trust in the author to adduce what is "deeply hidden." Gonen also makes the highly dubious claim that the "physical genocide [of the Jews] reflected also an internal psychological self-immolation" on the part of their German persecutors—as if Eichmann and other engineers of the Final Solution suffered from "psychological self-immolation." Finally, Gonen writes about Germans in an undifferentiated, ahistorical way, maintaining that "the ideology of death to the Jews but life to the Germans did not put the German self in conflict with its past beliefs." This assertion seems historically false, given nongenocidal nature of most of pre-Nazi German anti-Semitism—as well as the opposition of small but significant numbers of German gentiles to the Nazi program. In short, the internal psychological dynamics of Nazism deserve a more nuanced, historically grounded treatment that is
provided here.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8131-2154-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
HISTORY | PSYCHOLOGY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
A magnificent account of a central reality of our times, incorporating deep scientific expertise, broad political and social knowledge, and ethical insight, and Idled with beautifully written biographical sketches of the men and women who created nuclear physics. Rhodes describes in detail the great scientific achievements that led up to the invention of the atomic bomb. Everything of importance is examined, from the discovery of the atomic nucleus and of nuclear fission to the emergence of quantum physics, the invention of the mass-spectroscope and of the cyclotron, the creation of such man-made elements as plutonium and tritium, and implementation of the nuclear chain reaction in uranium. Even more important, Rhodes shows how these achievements were thrust into the arms of the state, which culminated in the unfolding of the nuclear arms race. Often brilliantly, he records the rise of fascism and of anti-Semitism, and the intensification of nationalist ambitions. He traces the outbreak of WW II, which provoked a hysterical rivalry among nations to devise the bomb. This book contains a grim description of Japanese resistance, and of the horrible psychological numbing that caused an unparalleled tolerance for human suffering and destruction. Rhodes depicts the Faustian scale of the Manhattan Project. His account of the dropping of the bomb itself, and of the awful firebombing that prepared its way, is unforgettable. Although Rhodes' gallery of names and events is sometimes dizzying, his scientific discussions often daunting, he has written a book of great drama and sweep. A superb accomplishment.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0684813785
Page Count: 932
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986
In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn’t pretty.
A meditation on Austria’s capitulation to the Nazis. The book won the 2017 Prix Goncourt.
Vuillard (Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business, 2017, etc.) is also a filmmaker, and these episodic vignettes have a cinematic quality to them. “The play is about to begin,” he writes on the first page, “but the curtain won’t rise….Even though the twentieth of February 1933 was not just any other day, most people spent the morning grinding away, immersed in the great, decent fallacy of work, with its small gestures that enfold a silent, conventional truth and reduce the entire epic of our lives to a diligent pantomime.” Having established his command of tone, the author proceeds through devastating character portraits of Hitler and Goebbels, who seduced and bullied their appeasers into believing that short-term accommodations would pay long-term dividends. The cold calculations of Austria’s captains of industries and the pathetic negotiations of leaders who knew that their protestations were mainly for show suggest the complicated complicity of a country where young women screamed for Hitler as if he were a teen idol. “The bride was willing; this was no rape, as some have claimed, but a proper wedding,” writes Vuillard. Yet the consummation was by no means as smoothly triumphant as the Nazi newsreels have depicted. The army’s entry into Austria was less a blitzkrieg than a mechanical breakdown, one that found Hitler stalled behind the tanks that refused to move as those prepared to hail his emergence wondered what had happened. “For it wasn’t only a few isolated tanks that had broken down,” writes the author, “not just the occasional armored truck—no, it was the vast majority of the great German army, and the road was now entirely blocked. It was like a slapstick comedy!” In the aftermath, some of those most responsible for Austria’s fall faced death by hanging, but at least one received an American professorship.
In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn’t pretty.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-969-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
GENERAL HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | MILITARY | HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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