The granddaughter of a Nazi Party member makes a powerful, convincing moral case for resisting toxic nationalism.
A German French journalist views amnesia about the Holocaust through the lens of her relatives’ lives—and raises an alarm about far-right movements.
Schwarz’s grandparents defied a Hollywood trope of Europeans caught up in the cataclysms of World War II: They were neither Nazi thugs nor noble resistance fighters. Her German Protestant paternal grandparents, Karl and Lydia Schwarz, were Mitläufer, people who “followed the current” of the times and, by looking away, helped to keep Hitler in power. Karl was an opportunistic rather than ideological Nazi Party member who profited from a policy that allowed him to buy a small oil business cheaply from Jewish owners but paid up when proprietors’ heirs later sued for reparations. In this exceptionally timely and well-reasoned debut, the author makes a powerful case that seeds of the recent resurgence of far-right nationalism in Europe were sown first by the denial and rationalizations of millions of people like her grandparents and then by postwar mythmaking that preempted the “memory work” needed to correct faulty recollections of Nazism. Germany has done heavy repair work—from creating Holocaust memorials to accepting more than 1 million refugees by the end of 2015—but France, Italy, Austria, and other countries lag far behind. Even in Germany, a backlash has arisen: After the Berlin Wall fell, “Eastalgia” parties sprang up in venues decorated with East German flags, banners, and other propaganda, and an extreme-right party holds its first Bundestag seat since 1949. Europeans used to be able count on American support in opposing tyrants, but that “safety net” unraveled with Donald Trump’s election, and Schwarz draws extended parallels between the president’s tactics and fascists’ (“first, stoke fear”). History doesn’t repeat itself, but “sociological and psychological mechanisms do,” and this book, a deserving winner of the European Book Prize, shows clearly how a willful amnesia can poison nations that have sworn never to forget the Holocaust.
The granddaughter of a Nazi Party member makes a powerful, convincing moral case for resisting toxic nationalism.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9908-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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