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RIBBENTROP

Powerful study of a life in Hitler's service, by Bloch (The Secret File of the Duke of Windsor, 1989, etc.). Bloch's young Ribbentrop is a shallow, friendly man of the middle class, characterized in early manhood by a love of sports and music, excellent manners, and snobbery (he added a phony ``von'' to his name). Son of a career officer, his education was slighted, but he traveled (as far as Canada) and made friends outside Germany, and his liquor-importing business strengthened these connections. Bloch makes clear that, into the early 30's, Ribbentrop was liberal in outlook, with Jewish friends, and that his international experience and personal finesse, rare in Nazi circles, were prized beyond their worth by Hitler, who assumed they indicated real sophistication. Ribbentrop acquired recognition by assisting in the maneuvers that made Hitler chancellor, and, in 1938, he was appointed Germany's foreign minister. He had diplomatic aspirations but neither gifts nor training and, as Bloch indicates, career diplomats of all nationalities abhorred him. Familiarity with the period and its major figures allows Bloch to present a detailed example of how Nazi Germany operated: Using Ribbentrop the social-climber, Hitler undermined and spied on the distrusted diplomatic service. Ongoing rivalries with Goebbels, Goering, and other Nazis represented here reveal a world in which everyone was set against everyone else by the master, and in which everything depended on his whim. Ribbentrop, acclimated to domination by his wife, was good at the game, debasing himself to the point where he was completely dependent on Hitler's approval for his state of mind. By the time Germany occupied Norway, Ribbentrop had become a raging anti-Semite—a changed man whose harangues in delicate diplomatic situations rivalled those of Hitler himself. Bloch controls his material expertly, balancing personal and historic elements to produce a fascinating, cautionary tale. (Sixteen-page b&w photo insert—not seen)

Pub Date: June 9, 1993

ISBN: 0-517-59310-6

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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