Riveting portraits of the spawn of evil.
Employing a novel, gripping concept, German journalist Stephen Lebert re-interviews the children of prominent Nazis, and mixes the material with interviews conducted in 1959 by his journalist father, Norbert Lebert.
Stephen Lebert begins with a bizarre moment: a funeral in 1995 for Ilse Hess, widow of Hitler deputy Rudolf Hess. Conducting the service was Martin Bormann Jr. (once a priest), and among the handful gathered there was Heinrich Himmler’s daughter. Lebert moves to a general consideration of the lingering effects of the Reich: “Is there a single German institution anywhere,” he wonders, “without dark stains on the pages of its history?” Lebert then establishes his structure—alternating his father’s accounts of the Nazi children with his own interviews conducted some 40 years later with some of the same individuals. The effect is at once powerful and poignant; the innocence of little children is contrasted with the evil of their fathers, as the doting parent is revealed to be a human butcher on a scale that still tests the imagination, even as it ices the heart. Lebert begins with Wolf-Rüdiger Hess, who once declined to serve in the German military because his father remained in Allied custody in Spandau Prison. Today, the younger Hess (who is in his late 60s) contends that his father did not commit suicide in Spandau, but was instead murdered. In a creepy exchange, he reveals that he views his father as a hero, and that his own son has been setting up a Web site in Rudolf Hess’s honor. Martin Bormann Jr. also consented to a recent interview and recalls that Himmler’s secretary once showed him a copy of Mein Kampf bound with skin from the back of a human being. Not everyone spoke with the younger Lebert. Edda Göring refused, as did Gundrun Himmler (whose only interview of her life was with the elder Lebert), and Robert von Schirach (son of Hitler’s youth leader) died in a car crash.
Riveting portraits of the spawn of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-51924-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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