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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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