by Martin Davidson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2011
A chilling exposé of a dark family secret.
BBC historian and filmmaker Davidson learns that his grandfather was a committed Nazi.
The author grew up knowing that his German grandfather, Bruno Langbehn, had fought in World War II, but the family never spoke of the details. Hints dropped by the old man himself were enough to tantalize, but Davidson was afraid to probe further. Visits to the family’s Berlin home did little to shed light. But when Bruno died in 1992, the author began to look deeper, discovering that Bruno had been not just a Nazi, but a committed, career SS officer. The son of a Prussian soldier, Bruno experienced both the nationalist fervor and the crushing letdown of Germany’s experience in World War I. Postwar society left him disoriented and looking for answers, which he found in the paramilitary right-wing groups that proliferated in 1920s Berlin. The charisma of Hitler and the lure of violence drew him into the SA, the brutal storm troopers, where he thrived in group that took “Murderers” as its nickname. Davidson doesn’t blink at the ugly truth of Bruno’s actions. Instead, he continues to dig, drawing on the little documentary evidence of Bruno’s activities and contemporaneous accounts by other German youths who followed the same path. With Hitler’s rise to power, internal Nazi politics made the SA less central to the party—at which point Bruno, who had a comfortable career as a dentist, switched in 1937 to the SS, where he served in a division that spied on the regime’s internal opposition. He was largely responsible for expelling Jews from the dental profession in Berlin. As the war heated up, he was sent to battle, injured and then redeployed as an SS spy. At every step, he acted as a true believer in Hitler and the Nazi doctrine, a loyalty that probably saved his life when he was briefly suspected of being part of a plot against the Führer. At the end of the war, he barely escaped execution, making his way back to Berlin where he successfully evaded the Allied denazification efforts. Davidson shows it all in telling detail, making little attempt to hide his horror at Bruno’s true nature.
A chilling exposé of a dark family secret.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-15701-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
Share your opinion of this book
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
Awards & Accolades
Likes
21
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
National Book Award Winner
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.