Kitchen ably portrays a hollow, cold, bourgeois man totally lacking in morals or scruples—exactly the type that made...
Kitchen (Emeritus, History/Simon Fraser Univ.; The Third Reich: Charisma and Community, 2014, etc.) sets the record straight on Albert Speer’s assertions of ignorance of the Final Solution and claims to being the “good Nazi.”
Speer came to the attention of Hitler in his capacity as an architect. If Hitler ever had any friends, Speer would have been his closest. At the end of this impressively researched book, the author hints at perhaps a closer relationship than friendship, not supported by fact but a good explanation for Speer’s ability to manipulate Hitler. Speer gained power in the Nazi machine by dealing directly with Hitler, bypassing the usual procedures. His peevish whining invariably accomplished his goal, and since Hitler believed his skewed and doctored statistics, he quickly climbed to the top. As minister of armaments, he did increase output, but his base line was a period when Germany thought the war would be short and production had been cut. Colleagues in the Nazi hierarchy detested his self-determination policy and profitable arrangement with industry. The biggest question about Speer has been his knowledge of the use of concentration camp inmates in industry and wartime production. Kitchen shows incontrovertibly that Speer not only knew of the practice, but was the greatest user of prisoners, many of whom were worked to death. Occasionally, the book gets bogged down in statistics and details of production, both real and invented, and the coverage of Speer’s trial is tedious. After his 20-year prison term, Speer completely rebuilt his image, carefully subverting the damning wartime chronicle kept by his longtime friend. As at Nuremburg, he admitted overall responsibility, but Kitchen puts it perfectly: “his guilt—like a figure in a Greek tragedy—was guiltless.”
Kitchen ably portrays a hollow, cold, bourgeois man totally lacking in morals or scruples—exactly the type that made National Socialism possible and could do so again.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-19044-1
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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