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 captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.
This chronicle of a chaotic year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies finds the writer and performer covering a whole lot of ground.
In terms of the calendar, Smith’s latest memoir has a tighter focus than its predecessors, M Train (2015) and Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The titular year is 2016, a year that would begin just after the author turned 69 and end with her turning 70. That year, Smith endured the death of her beloved friend Sandy Pearlman, the music producer and manager with whom she would “have coffee at Caffé Trieste, peruse the shelves of City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead”; and the decline of her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Sam Shepard. She held vigil for Pearlman at his hospital deathbed, and she helped Shepard revise his final manuscript, taking dictation when he could no longer type. Throughout, the author ponders time and mortality—no surprise considering her milestone birthday and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory and the timeless nature of a person’s spirit (her late husband remains very much alive in these pages as well). Seeing her own reflection, she thinks, “I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.” She refers to herself as the “poet detective,” and this particular year set her on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, lecture touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. “I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges,” she writes, “the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost.”
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65768-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in...
Legendary performance artist Abramovic unveils her story in this highly anticipated memoir.
When she was growing up, the author lived in an environment of privilege in Yugoslavia, which was on the verge of ruin. Her parents, two fervent communist partisans and loyal officers during Josip Broz Tito’s rule, were not the warmest people. Abramovic was put under the care of several people, only to be taken in by her grandmother. “I felt displaced and I probably thought that if I walked, it meant I would have to go away again somewhere,” she writes. Ultimately, she carried this feeling of displacement throughout most, if not all, of her career. Many remember The Artist Is Present, her 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during which she sat in front of museumgoers for 736 hours, but her work started long before then. As a woman who almost single-handedly launched female performance art, the author has spent the better part of her life studying the different ways in which the body functions in time and space. She pushed herself to explore her body’s limits and her mind’s boundaries (“I [have] put myself in so much pain that I no longer [feel] any pain”). For example, she stood in front of a bow and arrow aimed at her heart with her romantic and performance partner of 12 years, Ulay. She was also one of the first people to walk along the Great Wall of China, a project she conceived when secluded in aboriginal Australia. While the author’s writing could use some polishing, the voice that seeps through the text is hypnotizing, and readers will have a hard time putting the book down and will seek out further information about her work.
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in anticipation of what she is concocting for her next tour de force.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90504-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
© 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.
