A rigorously documented, essential work not only about Eichmann’s masterly masquerade, but also about how we come to accept...
A riveting reconstruction of a fanatical National Socialist’s obdurate journey in exile and appalling second career in Argentina.
Delving into a body of interviews Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962) made with pro-Nazi Dutch war propagandist Willem Sassen in Argentina in the late 1950s, German historian Stangneth reveals the chilling mindset of the unrepentant Nazi, later carefully disguised at his trial in Israel. Eichmann’s Argentine writings and interviews were not available to Hannah Arendt when she wrote her brilliant Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). In it, she portrays the wretched former SS colonel on trial for his life in 1961 as “just a small cog in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine” (his self-description), with none of the terrifying look of evil that an efficient engineer of the Final Solution should have displayed. Stangneth meticulously reveals how Eichmann was able to fool everyone, employing a cunning mixture of self-aggrandizement and opportunism, even during his early SS career in Austria when he was put in charge of Jewish affairs and was known as the “Czar of the Jews.” Eichmann was proud of being a man of importance, and at the end of the war, he reluctantly had to disguise himself among other displaced persons, eluding Allied capture and living for several years incognito in northern Germany as a chicken farmer. Successfully floating rumors that he had taken up with the Palestinian mufti, he threw Nazi hunters off his trail, and he was able to flee to Argentina effortlessly and with the aid of a ferocious coterie of exiled Nazis comfortably ensconced there. Stangneth masterfully sifts through the information from these lively social gatherings conducted at journalist Sassen’s home three years before Eichmann’s kidnapping by Israeli agents.
A rigorously documented, essential work not only about Eichmann’s masterly masquerade, but also about how we come to accept appearances as truth.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-95967-6
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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