bound to generate debate.
An English translation of a monumental and controversial new study of the politics and policies of Hitler’s Third Reich,
written by a respected journalist from Die Welt. Most studies of the Nazi regime, taking the bloodiest war and one of the most brutal massacres in history as its most vivid accomplishments, have concentrated on the military and racial depredations of that perverse commonwealth. The Nazi crimes were so monstrous that it is impossible to consider Nazi politics dispassionately, and difficult even to apply to them the usual hypotheses of political science. Zitelmann understands this attitude well, yet he argues it has resulted in a historiography whose flaws are so profound that German academics are unable to explain just how Hitler managed to win a democratic election in the first place. The tendency among left-wing historians to view Nazism as essentially reactionary and bourgeois is misguided, contends Zitelmann, because it obscures the extent to which National Socialism was indeed a revolutionary party that represented a break with the political status quo of the period and offered large numbers of German workers and peasants what looked like a real opportunity to shape their own destinies. Nazi economic policy, for example, was highly regulated, permitting private property but placing severe restrictions on the accrual of profit and the disposition of surpluses. Nazi labor and family policies were paternalistic, offering a safety net of guaranteed employment—or, in the case of mothers, exemption from employment—in exchange for disciplined productivity. Nazi investment in the national infrastructure of roadways and housing was a model of efficient state investment. Although much of Zitelmann’s text is slow-moving and pedantic, relying too heavily on statistics and footnotes, his main point—that a true understanding of Hitler’s rise to power must take closer account of the policies he promised and pursued—is
bound to generate debate.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2000
ISBN: 1-902809-03-3
Page Count: 540
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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
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
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