Timely, given the increase in right-wing intransigence throughout the world, and one of the best works on Hitler and the...
“Everything is happening exactly as we predicted.” So exulted Adolf Hitler in his salad days, before he brought the world tumbling down around him.
Will there ever be an end to books about the Nazi dictator? Not as long as there are new documents to be released from the archives. Longtime students of the literature surrounding the Third Reich will find no surprises here, but journalist/historian Ullrich’s primary audience is a generation of readers of German who have no direct knowledge of events, making it a thorough but eminently readable introduction to the receding past. The author deals with the usual turns, such as Hitler’s rough years as an aspiring artist and the horrors of trench warfare in World War I, but he adds welcome observations and interesting asides along the way. Irrespective of the musings of Allied soldiers on the subject, for instance, he suggests that Hitler enjoyed a normal if perhaps not exciting physical relationship with Eva Braun. Of less prurient interest, Ullrich details the careful unfolding of the Nazi plan to isolate—extermination will come later in this two-volume biography—the Jews of Europe, which accelerated beyond the original timetable because “rapidly pursuing anti-Jewish persecution does no harm to the system [and] does not cause any economic difficulties or any loss of prestige in the world at large,” in the words of one contemporary. Hitler, writes the author, was in fact keenly sensitive to public opinion, as revealed in the wake of the discovery that a senior military officer had married a onetime prostitute, when Hitler lamented, “if a German field marshal can marry a whore then anything is possible in this world.” Above all, in this long but skillfully narrated study, Ullrich reveals Hitler to have been an eminently practical politician—and frighteningly so.
Timely, given the increase in right-wing intransigence throughout the world, and one of the best works on Hitler and the origins of the Third Reich to appear in recent years.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35438-7
Page Count: 1008
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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