Despite a dearth of material, the authors deliver a chilling, well-researched biography that opens a whole new window on the...
The story of the man who set the mold for Adolf Hitler; both were delusional, megalomaniacal, irrational, and brilliant propagandists.
Brownell (So Close to Greatness: The Biography of William C. Bullitt, 1988) and Drace-Brownell introduce us to one of history’s most fearsome and least-known characters. Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937) helped lead the German army in World War I; victories were rousingly reported and losses rarely mentioned, even to the kaiser. Though the authors describe Ludendorff as a man without a shadow, impossible to fathom, a biographer’s nightmare, they successfully describe this beast of a man. He hated Jews and swore Germany would build a world empire. He had no friends and was rude to everyone, including the kaiser; he was effectively a dictator whom no one dared question. A short war required a speedy conquest of France before turning on Russia, foreshadowing World War II. The authors stress that the war was lost early on, stalled by the Belgians. In 1916, there was a chance for a compromise peace, but Ludendorff refused to accept anything but complete victory, convincing gullible Germans of their greatness while doubling causalities. The authors amply demonstrate the absurdity of some of his wild plots, none of which featured reasoned or workable strategies. Allowing Lenin to return to Russia changed world history, but it was useless in freeing up troops who were needed to enforce his draconian peace. He never really had a Plan B and never took responsibility for his failures. He invented the stab-in-the-back legend that Germany lost because of the Jews, and he swore that the “next war” would see them gassed just as his troops had been. Hitler and Ludendorff had similar philosophies, identical fanaticism, a strong belief in the German superman, and a desire to eliminate the Jews.
Despite a dearth of material, the authors deliver a chilling, well-researched biography that opens a whole new window on the world wars and the German psyche at the time.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61902-609-4
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.
This chronicle of a chaotic year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies finds the writer and performer covering a whole lot of ground.
In terms of the calendar, Smith’s latest memoir has a tighter focus than its predecessors, M Train (2015) and Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The titular year is 2016, a year that would begin just after the author turned 69 and end with her turning 70. That year, Smith endured the death of her beloved friend Sandy Pearlman, the music producer and manager with whom she would “have coffee at Caffé Trieste, peruse the shelves of City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead”; and the decline of her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Sam Shepard. She held vigil for Pearlman at his hospital deathbed, and she helped Shepard revise his final manuscript, taking dictation when he could no longer type. Throughout, the author ponders time and mortality—no surprise considering her milestone birthday and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory and the timeless nature of a person’s spirit (her late husband remains very much alive in these pages as well). Seeing her own reflection, she thinks, “I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.” She refers to herself as the “poet detective,” and this particular year set her on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, lecture touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. “I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges,” she writes, “the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost.”
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65768-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Literate and full of engaging historical asides. By far the best of the many lives of Hamilton now in print, and a model of...
A splendid life of an enlightened reactionary and forgotten Founding Father.
“In all probability,” writes financial historian/biographer Chernow (Titan, 1998, etc.), “Alexander Hamilton is the foremost political figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably had a much deeper and lasting impact than many who did.” Indeed, we live in a Hamiltonian republic through and through, and not a Jeffersonian democracy. Many of the financial and tax systems that Hamilton proposed and put in place as the nation’s first treasury secretary are with us today, if in evolved form, as Chernow shows; and though Hamilton was derided in his time as being pro-British and even a secret monarchist, Chernow writes, he was second only to George Washington in political prominence, at least on the practical, day-to-day front. The author wisely acknowledges but does not dwell unduly on Washington’s quasi-paternal role in Hamilton’s life and fortunes; unlike many biographies that consider Hamilton only in Washington’s shadow, this one grants him a life of his own—and a stirring one at that, for Hamilton was both intensely cerebral and a man of action. He was, Chernow writes, a brilliant ancestor of the abolitionist cause; a native of the slave island of Nevis, he came to hate “the tyranny embodied by the planters and their authoritarian rule, while also fearing the potential uprisings of the disaffected slaves”—a dichotomy that influenced his views of ordinary politics. He was also constantly in opposition to things as they were, particularly where those things were Jeffersonian; as Chernow shows, Hamilton had early on been “an unusually tolerant man with enlightened views on slavery, Native Americans, and Jews,” but became a crusty conservative near the end of his brief life (1755–1804), perhaps as a result of one too many personal setbacks at the hands of the Jeffersonians.
Literate and full of engaging historical asides. By far the best of the many lives of Hamilton now in print, and a model of the biographer’s art.Pub Date: April 26, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-009-2
Page Count: 802
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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