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
A vivid, gut-wrenching, beautifully written, memorable book.
With the assistance of New York Times Magazine writer Corbett, Lindhout, who was held hostage in Somalia for more than a year, chronicles her harrowing ordeal and how she found the moral strength to survive.
In 2008, Lindhout, after working as a cocktail waitress to earn travel money, was working as a freelance journalist. In an attempt to jump-start her fledgling career, she planned to spend 10 days in Mogadishu, a “chaotic, anarchic, staggeringly violent city.” She hoped to look beyond the “terror and strife [that] hogged the international headlines” and find “something more hopeful and humane running alongside it.” Although a novice journalist, she was an experienced, self-reliant backpacker who had traveled in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She hired a company to provide security for her and her companion, the Australian photographer Nigel Brennan, but they proved unequal to the task. Their car was waylaid by a gunman, and the group was taken captive and held for ransom. Her abductors demanded $2 million, a sum neither family could raise privately or from their governments. Negotiations played out over 15 months before an agreement for a much smaller sum was reached. The first months of their captivity, until they attempted an escape, were difficult but bearable. Subsequently, they were separated, chained, starved and beaten, and Lindhout was repeatedly raped. Survival was a minute-by-minute struggle not to succumb to despair and attempt suicide. A decision to dedicate her life to humanitarian work should she survive gave meaning to her suffering. As she learned about the lives of her abusers, she struggled to understand their brutality in the context of their ignorance and the violence they had experienced in their short lives. Her guards were young Muslim extremists, but their motive was financial. Theirs was a get-rich scheme that backfired. “Hostage taking is a business, a speculative one,” Lindhout writes, “fed by people like me—the wandering targets, the fish found out of water, the comparatively rich moving against a backdrop of poor.”
A vivid, gut-wrenching, beautifully written, memorable book.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4560-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
A memoir of sorts that blurs the boundary between the personal and the universal.
An American poet of Japanese descent illuminates the tensions that exploded with World War II and the aftershocks within his family.
By the time Shimoda (The Desert, 2018, etc.) came to know his grandfather, the latter was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and thus it was only after his death that the author began to untangle the narrative of his life as a citizen of one country living in another. The resonance of the story that he pieces together, through pilgrimages back to Japan and across the United States, extends well beyond a single family or ethnicity to the soul of his own native country, where “white settlers were the original aliens. They sought to diffuse their alienation, by claiming the land and controlling the movement and rights of the people for whom the land was not alien, but ancestral.” Shimoda’s grandfather was conceived in Honolulu and born in Japan, and he crossed the ocean to Seattle as a 9-year-old boy, without the rest of his family. World War II turned him into an “enemy alien,” though, as the author writes, “he was not born an enemy alien. He was made into an enemy alien. The first (alien) phase was immigration. The third (enemy) phase was the attack on Pearl Harbor. The second phase was the transition. Which was, for a Japanese man, ineligible for citizenship, compulsory.” He was a trained photographer, and by all evidence, a very good and sensitive one, but the main offense on which he was initially incarcerated was possessing a camera. Shimoda wades through memories and dreams; lives and graves that have no names documented; unspeakable horrors committed by the country where his grandfather lived on the people of his native country; and the attempts to memorialize what is too graphically terrible to remember. By the end, writes the author, “I was just learning how to see.”
A memoir of sorts that blurs the boundary between the personal and the universal.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-87286-790-1
Page Count: 186
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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