A personal and imaginative yet overlong perspective on German history.
The inhabitants of a summer house reveal Germany’s political, economic, and social history.
In 2013, journalist and biographer Harding (Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz, 2013) traveled to the lakeside vacation home outside Berlin where his grandmother had spent a bucolic childhood. He was shocked by its condition: abandoned, in disrepair, its roof cracked, its chimneys crumbling, the once-beloved refuge was in possession of the city of Potsdam, scheduled for demolition. The only way to save it, he learned, was to “prove that it was culturally and historically significant.” Harding’s efforts to amass that proof have resulted in a well-researched, intermittently interesting overview of 20th-century German history, focused on five families who lived in the house. In the 1890s, Otto Wollank, a wealthy businessman, bought the property, adding to his already large holdings in Berlin. In 1927, his son-in-law, an early Nazi supporter, leased part of the land to Harding’s great-grandfather Alfred Alexander, a prominent Jewish physician. After the Nazis took power, the Alexanders—including their daughter, who became Harding’s grandmother—reluctantly fled to London. Although the author claims that “virulent nationalism and anti-Semitism…[were] a rarity in the Germany of 1929,” he concedes that Jews could not serve in the army, secure a university professorship, or hold other state positions without converting to Christianity. The story he tells of Nazi persecution of Jews is, sadly, familiar. After the war, the house’s residents included a working-class family whose access to the lake was cut off by the Berlin Wall. Surprisingly, Hardings’ relatives responded with hostility to his pleas to claim and restore the house, eventually giving in and participating in a cleanup day. The house was saved, and Harding asks readers to contribute to its restoration.
A personal and imaginative yet overlong perspective on German history.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-06506-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
PROFILES
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
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