A striking—and potentially explosive—combination of history and psychology. Perhaps no subject lends itself more to the temptation of psychologizing than Hitler and the Holocaust. For the past 50 years, the “Final Solution” and its creator have been subjected to every school of psychoanalysis by experts and charlatans alike. This is dangerous terrain. Critics of psychohistory point out the obvious—that the analysand is no longer around to analyze. Defenders’such as historian Peter Gay—insist that the field can yield new insights if properly controlled. This new contribution to the literature is by the author of the highly praised Nazi Germany: A New History (not reviewed). Fischer attempts to psychoanalyze an entire culture over the last 900 years of its history. He traces the roots of German Judeophobia back as early as the First Crusade in 1096, with the pendulum swinging between periods of relative toleration and bestial brutality. Fischer points out that the Nazis did not invent the notion of the Jew as spiritually perverse (credit goes to St. Paul and the early Church), nor the idea of biological racism (the first grand inquisitor, Torquemada, already was speaking of mala sangre in the 15th century). Throughout, Fischer uses the more clinical word “Judeophobia” and the descriptive “Jew-hatred” rather than the more common —anti-Semitism,— thus “shifting the onus of responsibility to where it really belongs . . . removing doubts as to its destructive potential.” Equally central to his argument is that the ideological motivation for the Holocaust can be found in “human delusion” and the demons it inspires, such as “fear, paranoia, projection, scapegoating, and aggression.” As to the question of how many Germans shared the Nazis— murderous impulses, Fischer concludes that this cannot be conclusively answered, but in describing the Holocaust as the “harvest of Judeophobic hatred,” he is clearly drawing the many strands of German anti-Semitism together in a final conflagration. An important contributon, sure to fan the flames of controversy.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8264-1089-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Continuum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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