A shocking, disturbingly believable portrait of the Final Solution and the depravity that enabled it.
The rotting soul of an SS guard lies bare in this harrowing odyssey through a concentration camp.
In the waning days of World War II, Peter, a 19-year-old German soldier of the Eastern Front, is relieved when his uncle wangles him a safer berth as a guard at a small “labor camp” in occupied Poland. He’s seen and caused plenty of carnage fighting Russians, but nothing prepares him for the camp, where trainloads of Jews, Poles and Gypsies—“material” to the Nazis—are shipped in ostensibly to quarry granite, but really for extermination. Through his eyes, Watkins sees a panorama of barbarism: the train platform where incoming families are beaten, shot and shredded by dogs for any infraction or none; the “showers” where most new arrivals are immediately gassed; the quarry where inmates collapse moving stones back and forth; the camp brothel where female prisoners eke out a few extra weeks of existence by servicing their tormentors. Watkin’s meticulously researched depiction of these horrors is matter-of-fact but grimly evocative. “There was a shrieking inside the shower that sounded like wind in a tunnel,” he writes. Unbearable scenes of cruelty, mothers mourning or abandoning their children, prisoners killing each other over scraps of food or a last gasp of air: The blunt account of a death camp—of unbridled savagery made routine—is heavy. Over the camp, like crematorium smoke, hangs the despair in knowing that every kindly human impulse amounts to nothing. As Peter struggles to retain a shred of decency, he becomes a revealing study in moral corruption. Although he considers himself better than his sadistic comrades—he beats and kills prisoners only when ordered—Peter flounders in ghastly ironies: When he tries to help a prisoner with whom he has fallen in love, he does so by inflicting casual brutality on another woman. With chilling realism and shrewd psychological insight, Watkins captures the hellish glow of inhumanity willingly kept aflame by normalized evil.
A shocking, disturbingly believable portrait of the Final Solution and the depravity that enabled it.Pub Date: April 15, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Ronald J. Watkins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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