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 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
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