Of great interest to students of the Nazi regime and of the inexhaustible human capacity for evil.
A thoughtful reassessment of Albert Speer’s role in the Third Reich.
Hannah Arendt was thinking of Adolf Eichmann when she coined the phrase “the banality of evil,” but those words were tailor-made for Speer, “the successful average man, well-dressed, civil, non-corrupt,” who early on hitched his wagon to Hitler’s star. As German historian Fest (Plotting Hitler’s Death, 1996, etc.) takes pains to point out, Speer distinguished himself from the rest of the Nazi leadership by his very normalcy: the perfect corporate man, he had no apparent perversions, no weird addictions, not even much of a lust for power. It was no accident, however, that Speer became a member of Hitler’s inner circle, and perhaps the Führer’s only real friend. “Each found in the other what he missed in himself,” Fest ventures in a rare moment of psychologizing, “admiring, in a form of transferred self-love, the ideal image of himself.” Some dark ambition may have driven Speer, but he knew what he was doing and labored loyally and intently for the Nazis. He gave the regime much of its look, choreographing the mass rallies of Nuremberg and designing the monumental buildings of Berlin, as well as its highly efficient methods of killing political enemies and carting away their possessions. Yet for reasons that remain obscure, he avoided the gallows, unlike so many of his peers. Fest seems inclined to take Speer at his word when, after 20 years of solitary confinement, he expressed regret for his ill-advised choice of friends; indeed, the author observes, he was the only high-ranking official in the Nazi leadership to have admitted guilt or responsibility for his crimes. Even so, this is no apology, and Fest paints a suitably damning portrait of the man whom John Kenneth Galbraith once described as being “a very intelligent escapist from the truth.”
Of great interest to students of the Nazi regime and of the inexhaustible human capacity for evil.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-15-100556-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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