A straightforward work that only hints at the underlying questions of moral failing supported by many of these philosophical...
A systematic breakdown of the core players and ideas usurped in Nazi ideology.
British academic Sherratt (Continental Philosophy of Social Science, 2005, etc.) deconstructs the making of Hitler’s thinking, from the writing of his autobiography as a political vehicle to his “savage bowdlerization” of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and many other philosophers. Whether Hitler actually read the works he appropriated did not matter, writes the author. He plucked what he needed from this or that philosopher: From Kant, he claimed the supremacy of reason over the dogma of the church and the degradation of Judaism; from Schiller, the beloved motto: “The strong man is mightiest alone”; from Hegel, the formation of the state from ancient origins; from Nietzsche, his fantasies of an ancient Greek ideal; and so on. As a “bartender of genius,” Hitler concocted his lethal ideas about racial supremacy, the lone Romantic hero within the Bavarian natural landscape, the Jewish “enemy” and the obsession with “public health.” He needed a coterie of deputies to carry out his political fantasies, namely Alfred Rosenberg, whose job was to “destroy democracy and construct a new Nazi ideal” by infiltrating the schools and universities; and legal mind Carl Schmitt, who “enshrined Hitler’s tyranny in law.” Some of the philosophers acquiesced for the advancement of their careers—e.g., Martin Heidegger, whose affair with his student Hannah Arendt, a Jew, rendered his collaboration all the more baffling or suspect. Jewish philosophers stripped of their university positions either fled or were destroyed. Sherratt devotes one chapter to the singular resistance of one Munich academic, Kurt Huber, and another to the reckoning meted out to the collaborating philosophers at the Nuremberg Trials.
A straightforward work that only hints at the underlying questions of moral failing supported by many of these philosophical works.Pub Date: May 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-15193-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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