A well-considered slice of the Nazi era, and one with a happy ending.
A vivid reconstruction of the final weeks of Hitler’s regime.
In mid-April 1945, the Soviets launched an offensive against Berlin “with twenty armies, two and a half million soldiers, and more than forty thousand mortars and field guns”—an avenging force of an almost unimaginable size and scale. Hitler retreated into the Reich Chancellery, but not before warning that this “Asian onslaught” had to be stopped; if it were not, he warned, Germany’s “old people, men, and children will be murdered, and women and girls will be forced to serve as barracks whores.” Thus inspired, the Volksturm and Wehrmacht units charged with defending the city put up a stiff fight, even as Hitler continued to imagine that with Franklin Roosevelt’s death the Western Allies would realize that their enemy was Russia and join Hitler’s crusade. The fall of Vienna to the Soviets put an end to that vision, and Hitler—physically and mentally ill—waited out Marshal Zhukov’s arrival while gorging himself on chocolate cake. An inglorious end, that, and German historian Fest (Speer: The Final Verdict, 2002, etc.) surprises with a number of unreported or overlooked details—such as a letter that Albert Speer had written to Hitler only a few weeks before, chiding him “for equating the existence of Germany with his own life span, describing this as an egocentricity unparalleled in history.” For all that, Hitler shot his wife and then himself, leaving it to the handful of remaining stalwarts to burn their corpses. Fest confirms that widely published photographs of Hitler’s corpse were a hoax, but adds the intriguing note that many of the theories concerning Hitler’s supposed survival came straight from Josef Stalin: “Once he said that Hitler had escaped to Japan in a submarine; another time he mentioned Argentina; and later he said something about Franco’s Spain.”
A well-considered slice of the Nazi era, and one with a happy ending.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-13577-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.
Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that...
A man who spent four decades in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit tells his shocking story.
Born in 1947 in the “Negro” wing of a New Orleans hospital, Woodfox helped his family eke out survival through petty crimes. Though he showed academic potential, he left high school before graduation, spending his time on streets patrolled by mostly white police officers, who “came through our neighborhood picking up black men for standing on the corner, charging them with loitering or vagrancy, looking to meet their quota of arrests. Once in custody, who knows what charges would be put on those men.” Arrested at 18, the author entered Angola penitentiary, where his defiance and his affiliation with a nonviolent chapter of the Black Panther Party led to racist, sadistic guards targeting him. When a white prison guard was mysteriously murdered while on duty, prison officials framed Woodfox for the killing despite his detailed presentation of evidence that another inmate had committed the crime. The bulk of the book chronicles the author’s solitary confinement over the next 40 years. In many cases, inmates subjected to these brutal conditions slowly lose their sanity and sometimes commit suicide. Woodfox explains how he overcame those odds despite relentless despair. Through a series of unusual occurrences, public-interest lawyers and other prison reformers learned about his treatment. The activists began building a two-pronged case, advocating for a declaration of innocence regarding the murder and seeking an end to Woodfox’s solitary confinement. Though the author is obviously not an impartial source, that understandable bias mingles throughout the narrative with fierce intelligence and the author’s touching loyalty to fellow prisoners also being brutalized. Nearly every page of the book is depressing because of the inhumane treatment of the prisoners, which often surpasses comprehension. But it’s an important story for these times, and readers will cheer the author’s eventual re-entry into society.
An astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that it never could happen in real life.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2908-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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