by Timothy W. Ryback ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 21, 2014
A chilling, lawyerly study with laserlike focus.
A painstakingly researched work regards the brief period early in Hitler’s chancellorship when the murderous events at Dachau might have been stopped by law and order.
Paris-based author Ryback (Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped His Life, 2008, etc.) tracks the crescendo of events in early 1933, after Hitler blamed the mysterious Reichstag fire on a communist conspiracy and a wave of arrests began filling the first concentration camp outside Munich—accompanied by suspicious deaths. Deputy prosecutor Josef Hartinger of the Dachau jurisdiction, where the detention center for political prisoners had been erected on the site of a former munitions factory, was informed on April 13 that four prisoners had been shot and killed while trying to escape. Investigating the murders, Hartinger and a few loyal colleagues discovered that the prison was not under the command of Bavarian state police, but under the Nazi SS: vicious and unrestrained officers who had unleashed a string of atrocities against the victims (all of whom, it turned out, were Jews). More deaths followed, and Hartinger, a middling civil servant and devout Roman Catholic who showed astounding courage at this dangerous juncture, proceeded with indictments against the murderous guards, despite a warning from the chief prosecutor, in cahoots with chief of Bavarian police Heinrich Himmler, that he would not sign them. Nonetheless, before May 30, when Dachau was officially transferred to SS authority, there was an attempt to regulate it by the rule of law. Ryback ties Hartinger’s report (which eventually surfaced at the postwar Nuremberg trials) to an earlier landmark study, Emil Gumbel’s Four Years of Political Murder (1922), in which the University of Heidelberg professor attempted to explain the upsurge in violence sweeping the land of “poets and thinkers” in the immediate postwar years.
A chilling, lawyerly study with laserlike focus.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35291-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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PROFILES
by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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
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by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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