Here, from the dean of Holocaust historians, is that rarity, a contemporary autobiography that is actually too short. Recently retired as a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, Hilberg writes movingly of his youth in Vienna and his experiences as a refugee in Cuba and New York. The heart of his work recounts the 13 lonely years he spent sifting through over 40,000 German documents while researching his pioneering, magisterial work, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), the first study to look at the German bureaucratic machinery of destruction from 1933 on. He notes how difficult it was to find a publisher—several university presses (including Princeton and Columbia) rejected the manuscript. Hilberg also staunchly defends his controversial thesis that during the Holocaust, European Jewish institutions became ``an extension of the German bureaucratic machine.'' Yet his view on this question is severely limited by his lack of access to the Yiddish and Hebrew sources carefully culled by Isaiah Trunk in his book Judenrat. This definitive work on the Jewish councils under Nazi rule paints a much more complex picture of local Jewish leaders' behavior. However, Hilberg is on target in critiquing such historians as Martin Gilbert, who define ``Jewish resistance'' during the Holocaust so broadly as to render the concept almost meaningless. He also settles scores with other scholars and popular historians of the Holocaust, most notably political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Hilberg tellingly notes how extensively Arendt ``borrowed'' from The Destruction for her Eichmann in Jerusalem, while providing only the flimsiest credit. Hilberg's style is crisp and succinct, perhaps to a fault. This is very much the memoir of a scholar; those hoping for extensive insights into Hilberg the man will be disappointed. One is left wanting more, though also filled with admiration for this remarkable historian's single-minded dedication to his craft.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1996
ISBN: 1-56663-116-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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