A footnote to a much larger story but a welcome one.
A fascinating scholarly detective story centering on the often overlooked ideological architect of the Third Reich, who could never be made to “accept the notion that the ideas he had trumpeted had led to genocide.”
Bound up in this study of Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), whose influence on Nazi policy was constant until a late-in-the-game falling-out with Hitler, is a tale of how his diary wound up in the United States, now in the holdings of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. That tale involves a Jewish lawyer who, ousted from his post in the German government by Hermann Göring, ended up in the U.S. advising the FBI and eventually returning to Germany to work for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials. Robert Kempner (1899-1993) was no less diligent an archivist than the Nazi regime he detested, and, write former FBI investigator Wittman (Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures, 2010) and journalist Kinney (The Dylanologists, 2014, etc.), he “spent four years immersed in the documentary evidence of the Nazi crimes.” Moreover, brilliant as a researcher and litigator while also a first-class hoarder, he squirrelled away some of that documentary evidence in his own archives, including Rosenberg’s diary. The picture that long-missing diary affords of those Nazi crimes does not remake our understanding, but it certainly adds to it. When Rosenberg grimly writes, “some still haven’t yet understood…that things have to be calculated differently now,” he is signaling the onset of the extermination of Europe’s Jews. The two narrative threads—one tracking Rosenberg across two decades of Nazi activism and the other examining the fortunes of his diary—don’t always line up neatly, and the storyline sometimes has a stop-and-go quality. However, the authors do an excellent job of teasing out the fine details and placing them in the larger context, in the bargain offering overdue acknowledgment of Kempner’s many contributions to the short-lived effort to bring Nazis to judgment.
A footnote to a much larger story but a welcome one.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-231901-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
