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
A somewhat didactic examination of the biological and psychological bases of normal moods, along with research-based advice on changing bad ones into good ones. Thayer (Psychology/California State Univ., Long Beach) has his own vocabulary for discussing moods. Assuming the interconnectedness of physical and mental states, he says that two arousal continuums—one ranging from energetic to tired and one from calm to tense—together with the thoughts they influence, produce what we call moods. The optimal mood is one of calm-energy; calm-tiredness and tense-energy are less good; tense-tiredness is distinctly bad. The author examines the intricate ways in which these continuums interact with each other; biological influences on mood, such as exercise and food (for instance, he found that sugary snacks increase tension); the congruence between our thoughts and moods (positive thoughts accompany positive moods, etc.); and the effects of such factors as drugs, sunlight, social interactions, and life events. Neurochemistry, physiology, and anatomy are touched on lightly, but Thayer notes that research has far to go in discovering just how these relate to mood. Through self-observation, he says, one can discover one's daily rhythms of energy and predict the likely times of vulnerability to tension. Mood regulation to Thayer is a matter of matching one's activities to one's naturally occurring moods. In focusing on methods people use to alter their moods, he notes that exercise is the most effective way both to raise energy and to reduce tension. Although Thayer seems to be trying to reach a broad audience by putting discussions of methodology and various technical issues in back-of-the-book notes, his classroom style diminishes this work's appeal for the general reader.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-19-508791-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
The author's memories of early adolescence, as taken from her rediscovered diaries. Israeloff (In Confidence, 1989), a contributing editor at Parents magazine and the mother of two, found her diaries and began reliving her experiences in the eighth grade. A former honors student, Israeloff relates with astonishing accounting skills the exact score on nearly every test she took in that pivotal year. Though the diaries read like the awkward scribblings of a precocious adolescent, Israeloff the grown-up has determined to see something more sinister: the ghost of the success she would have been if she were a boy. ``Rutherford,'' her father's pet name for her, takes on enormous weight and serves as a tired metaphor for the male child Israeloff was not. It is an unfortunate choice. Israeloff's adult musings are forced, and her recollections of the eighth grade are mercilessly mined for evidence of academic deprivation: An item of crude graffiti on one of Israeloff's student-council campaign posters is rendered in heartbreaking terms, although the author admits that she had forgotten the incident until the diary brought it back to her. A long series of A+ papers and other accomplishments contradict the complaints of Israeloff that, as a female, she was overlooked. Vague references to studies showing that women lose academic courage in high school are not borne out in Israeloff's case by the text, which covers her high school years in a few short paragraphs. Israeloff reaches her stride in gentle reminiscences of her father, but her broad generalizations about her home life lack nuance. The obligatory visit to her old school is sadly lifeless, and her amorphous rage at a former doting teacher offers an ugly end to this memoir. The star of her eighth-grade class, devoted as a young girl to logical argument, has produced a narrative stocked with sweeping statements ill supported by facts.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80081-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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