A marvelously rigorous account of a notorious war criminal, edifying and moving.
A biography offers an analysis of the role played by the commandant of Auschwitz in the abuse and murder of its Jewish prisoners.
Not much in Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss’ youth presaged his infamous career as a Nazi—he grew up in a strict Roman Catholic household led by a father who wished him to become a priest. Nevertheless, he was the commandant of Auschwitz in southwestern Poland—a concentration camp that was central to Hitler’s plan to rid Europe of Jews—and “superintended the destruction of more than a million human beings,” becoming the “greatest mass murderer in history.” Primomo chronicles Höss’ early life and his ambitiously fast ascendancy up the SS ranks. The author focuses on the Nazi’s command of Auschwitz, which he turned, through ruthless efficiency, into a labor and extermination camp. When the Germans were finally defeated, Höss changed his name and fled, but he was eventually hunted down, captured, and testified in Nuremberg. His testimony, which the author meticulously examines, was invaluable to prosecutors. Höss was later tried for murder and executed in Poland. Primomo also assesses the commandant’s memoirs and his insistent claim that he never intentionally mistreated prisoners and even tried to stop whatever abuse occurred. But Höss relates with chilling impassivity the mass exterminations and refers to “the sight of the dead Jews scientifically as if they were nothing more than experimental lab rats.” The author scrupulously undermines Höss’ moral defense of himself and exposes him for the remorseless killer he was. Höss had intimate knowledge of Auschwitz’s barbaric conditions and how the “tormented life imposed on Auschwitz inmates was destroying their souls.” Primomo’s biography is unflinchingly painstaking and, while often disturbing to read, bears an important journalistic witness to some of the darkest atrocities in human history.
A marvelously rigorous account of a notorious war criminal, edifying and moving.Pub Date: July 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4766-8146-7
Page Count: 251
Publisher: McFarland
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1174
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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