Admirably thorough and packed with facts, though often arid and mired in specifics. Readers may wish for a shorter, more...
Exhaustive—and sometimes exhausting—life of the Nazi functionary who rivaled Adolf Hitler in power and influence.
In disfavor for the last couple of decades, psychohistory finds a champion in Longerich (Modern German History/Royal Holloway University of London; Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, 2010, etc.), who puts Heinrich Himmler on the couch and finds in him a bundle of neuroses, including attachment disorder: “People who suffer from this kind of dysfunction acquired in early childhood frequently tend, while growing up and as adults, to attach very high expectations to personal relationships, though they cannot define these expectations precisely, and as a result they cannot be fulfilled.” Be that as it may, and cold fish though Himmler was, he was methodical in building and maintaining his personal power. Weak and sickly, he nonetheless became commandant of Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the “protection squad,” building it from a small and elite guard into an organization to rival the size and power of the regular Wehrmacht, or army. Indeed, writes the author, one of the leaders of the attempted assassination of Hitler in 1944 reckoned “that a coup was unavoidable if the army were not to be at the mercy of the SS in the short or long term.” Longerich credits Himmler with helping develop the misty Teutonic mythology that provided the mythic basis of the regime and the white-knight image of the SS. He also demonstrates, ably but in sometimes narrative-crushing detail, that Himmler was skilled in reading the signs of the growing radicalization of the regime and getting there first, adapting the SS every couple of years to changing conditions. Himmler was also adept at keeping his skin even while incurring Hitler’s disfavor at times—especially at the end of the war, when he attempted to bargain his way, using Jews as pawns, into a separate accommodation with the advancing Allies.
Admirably thorough and packed with facts, though often arid and mired in specifics. Readers may wish for a shorter, more pointed treatment, but, psychologizing aside, students of World War II will likely find this the last word on its immediate subject.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-19-959232-6
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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