Compelling research and original insights bring a fuller understanding to the mind and motives of the demagogue.
Challenging the notion that Hitler was “merely an empty canvas that had been filled with the collective wishes of the Germans.”
German-born historian Weber (History and International Affairs/Univ. of Aberdeen; Hitler's First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War, 2010, etc.) turns many assumptions on their heads in this incisive study of Hitler’s improbable evolution and rise from 1918 onward. Contrary to his own narrative created in Mein Kampf about his war experience, as well as assertions by later historians, Hitler returned from the Western front in World War I with “still fluctuating political ideas” that “oscillated between different collectivist left-wing and right-wing ideas” and no real stance against the left-wing revolutionary movement gripping Munich, where he then was living. Refusing to be demobilized from the army that essentially took care of him, he actually served in the new revolutionary regime of Kurt Eisner, who was assassinated in early 1919, thus accelerating the city’s radicalization and further move from democratization. Weber describes Hitler then as “a drifter and opportunist who quickly accommodated himself to the new political realities.” The office of Vertrauensmann (“soldiers’ representative”) of his company was his first-ever leadership role, giving him “a raison d'être for his existence.” After the fall of Munich’s “Soviet Republic” in April 1919, he became a “turncoat” and informant, rewriting his previous involvement with the revolutionary movement. Weber finds that the ratification of the Versailles Treaty on July 9 became “Hitler’s Damascene experience,” as he (and most other Germans) did not fully realize they had lost the war. Attending anti-Bolshevik training classes, and then becoming a propaganda lecturer himself, sparked the beginning of Hitler’s political career, during which he emphasized questions of why Germany lost the war and how the country “had to reorganize itself to be safe for all times.” Weber astutely examines how Hitler took anti-Semitism to its virulent “biologized form.”
Compelling research and original insights bring a fuller understanding to the mind and motives of the demagogue.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-03268-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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