In his first book, Townsend, a writer and editor with the Pew Research Center's Religion and Public Life Project, examines World War II’s most unusual ministry: the pastoring of the architects of the Third Reich.
On Nov. 20, 1945, the Allies commenced the Nuremberg Trials, an unprecedented proceeding that charged Hitler’s top lieutenants—Goering, Kesselring et al.—with conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity. Due to the strict security surrounding the prisoners, the Chaplain Corps was called upon for the first time in its 230-year history to supply religious counseling to America’s enemies. Assigned to this controversial task since he was Lutheran (like so many of the German prisoners), spoke the language and had experience with prison ministries, Chaplain Henry Gerecke (1893–1961) worked for nearly a year to rescue the souls of some of history’s most notorious defendants. Gerecke’s prewar life story, a quick review of the Chaplain Corps’ evolution, scene-setting to explain the Nuremberg tribunal’s composition and mission, thumbnail sketches of the Nazi henchmen and a recitation of the atrocities they engineered, and prison life for the war criminals are all part of Townsend’s story. However, he focuses most on Gerecke’s delicate interactions with his highly unusual flock. Passages recalling the middle-aged St. Louis preacher’s counseling of Goering (and the decision to deny the Luftwaffe commander Holy Communion) and Gerecke’s first meeting with Rudolf Hess are especially well-done. Townsend authoritatively addresses the excruciating moral and religious issues confronting wartime chaplains and deftly explains the role of a spiritual adviser in bringing the wrongdoer, even one seemingly beyond redemption, back to “a place of restoration.”
Gerecke’s story is only a footnote to “the trial of the century,” but Townsend thoroughly understands and skillfully handles the rich, potentially explosive material it contains.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-199719-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | MILITARY | HISTORY
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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