Deft and probing, with stunningly close-up glimpses of a maniac’s ascendancy.
Penetrating biography of a man once on such intimate terms with Hitler that his son would know the Holocaust’s progenitor as “Uncle Dolph.”
Dubbed “Putzi,” an affectionate nickname from his American mother that haunted his entire adult life, Ernst Hanfstaengl was born in 1887 to a prominent Bavarian family engaged in publishing reproductions of fine art. He struggled academically at Harvard, though he was well liked as a bon vivant and party pianist, but managed to graduate in 1909. Running the family’s New York gallery, he became an acquaintance of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s through the Harvard Club. The stage was thus set for a fascinating double life, notes Conradi, deputy foreign editor of the London Times. By 1921, Putzi had married Helene Neimeyer, daughter of German immigrants, and they had a son, Egon, but he was at odds with an older brother and decided to return home. Urged by a friend to hear Hitler speak, Hanfstaengl sensed that a country in turmoil was prone to Nazism’s lures. He joined Hitler’s entourage as a “civilizing” tutor, piano-therapist (playing Hitler’s favorite Wagnerian themes), and sometime pimp (he often worried about the leader’s lack of a sex life); later he became the party’s foreign press liaison. Fleeing the failed 1923 Munich Beer Hall putsch, Hanfstaengl made for Austria while Hitler went to Putzi’s country house, where Helene and Egon were waiting. The police followed, and Hitler attempted suicide, but Helene, upon whom the Fuehrer had an obsessive, lap-dog crush, literally knocked the pistol out of his mouth, thus securing his place in history. Finally repelled by Hitler’s extremism, Putzi (divorced by his wife in 1936) narrowly escaped the Reich in 1937, ultimately becoming a key figure in FDR’s psy-war Project S.
Deft and probing, with stunningly close-up glimpses of a maniac’s ascendancy.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1283-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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