A masterful account of the quintessential Nazi.
A gripping biography of an irrepressibly evil historical figure.
Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) was Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man, an architect of the Holocaust known as “the Butcher of Prague.” Czech and Slovak resisters killed him in May 1942, and while his personal writing contains few insights, his wife, who survived him by 40 years, spoke freely during numerous interviews with biographer Dougherty, who died in 2013. In the introduction, Lehmann-Haupt writes that his job as editor was “to sharpen and highlight [Dougherty’s] all-but-tragic vision of Heydrich’s descent into profound evil.” The result is an engrossing biography that cuts away regularly to Heydrich’s wife as she delivers her version of events and freely expresses her opinion of her husband’s colleagues and superiors, including Hitler. Loyal to the end, she remained skeptical that he was a war criminal, preferring to see him as an earnest patriot in a dysfunctional system. As a child, Heydrich excelled at school and sports. He joined the navy in 1922 but was cashiered in 1931, apparently for dishonorable behavior. A fervent nationalist, he had joined the Nazi Party months earlier, and SS chief Himmler hired him to develop an intelligence service. At the time, the SS was a minor department that provided security for Hitler, but Heydrich proved a brilliant organizer, and by 1936, the SS controlled all of Germany’s police. Heydrich quickly acquired his fearsome reputation as the consummate Nazi bureaucrat: ruthless and, unlike most, uncorrupt and efficient. He persecuted Jews, organized the Einsatzgruppen that followed German armies invading Poland and Russia to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians, and often (but not always) treated Czechs without mercy as their governor. Nearly 600 pages of cutthroat Nazi political maneuvering added to genuine throat-cutting in Germany and throughout Europe would be excessive in less-skilled hands, but Dougherty, with the assistance of Heydrich’s wife and Lehmann-Haupt, has the right stuff.
A masterful account of the quintessential Nazi.Pub Date: May 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-394-54341-3
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
