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
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
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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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