The history and thoroughly believable up-and-down career of an early Nazi fall victim to a strange ”what if?” anticlimax....
An early Brownshirt gets involved with Hitler’s niece and alters the course of history.
National Socialism’s lean days in the 1920s, when the party wasn’t yet just Hitler, provide the background for this debut from Newsweek International senior editor Nagorski, whose nonfiction The Birth of Freedom (1993) dealt with eastern Europe’s reemergence. Here, young Berliner Karl Naumann drifts away from the wreck of a household haunted by the death of his older brother in the Great War and by an abusive father. In the chaos wreaked by that war, the handsome and uneducated but intelligent youth is just confused enough to drift to the National Socialists, attracted by the party’s patriotism and dedication to the little man. Influenced by real-life party activists Otto and Gregor Strasser, Karl finds family feeling and a mission in the Free Corps, a paramilitary organization run by Otto that, as the S.A., would become part of Hitler’s organized thug troops. Karl is happy to leave Berlin and the scene of his young sexual frustrations in order to be closer to the heart of the party in Munich. There, in a city much more attractively German than polyglot Berlin, Karl becomes involved with Sabine, a pretty, nonpolitical nurse, and works his way from the fringes of the party to real activism as a Youth Corps leader. Hitler is very present, and Karl sees much of him, observing and sometimes falling victim to the future Führer’s magnetic oratory. But the oratory is less compelling than the attractions of Geli, the daughter of Hitler’s half-sister and a permanent attachment of the household. There are camping trips with the jugend and communist-bashing sessions with the S.A., but even though Karl marries Sabine, his heart is less and less in the party and more and more obsessed with the luscious Geli—as, it becomes obvious, is her creepy half-uncle.
The history and thoroughly believable up-and-down career of an early Nazi fall victim to a strange ”what if?” anticlimax. (For another fictional rendering of Hitler’s “love” affair with the gorgeous Geli, see Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece, 1999.)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3750-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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