Of great interest to students of the Nazi regime and of the inexhaustible human capacity for evil.
A thoughtful reassessment of Albert Speer’s role in the Third Reich.
Hannah Arendt was thinking of Adolf Eichmann when she coined the phrase “the banality of evil,” but those words were tailor-made for Speer, “the successful average man, well-dressed, civil, non-corrupt,” who early on hitched his wagon to Hitler’s star. As German historian Fest (Plotting Hitler’s Death, 1996, etc.) takes pains to point out, Speer distinguished himself from the rest of the Nazi leadership by his very normalcy: the perfect corporate man, he had no apparent perversions, no weird addictions, not even much of a lust for power. It was no accident, however, that Speer became a member of Hitler’s inner circle, and perhaps the Führer’s only real friend. “Each found in the other what he missed in himself,” Fest ventures in a rare moment of psychologizing, “admiring, in a form of transferred self-love, the ideal image of himself.” Some dark ambition may have driven Speer, but he knew what he was doing and labored loyally and intently for the Nazis. He gave the regime much of its look, choreographing the mass rallies of Nuremberg and designing the monumental buildings of Berlin, as well as its highly efficient methods of killing political enemies and carting away their possessions. Yet for reasons that remain obscure, he avoided the gallows, unlike so many of his peers. Fest seems inclined to take Speer at his word when, after 20 years of solitary confinement, he expressed regret for his ill-advised choice of friends; indeed, the author observes, he was the only high-ranking official in the Nazi leadership to have admitted guilt or responsibility for his crimes. Even so, this is no apology, and Fest paints a suitably damning portrait of the man whom John Kenneth Galbraith once described as being “a very intelligent escapist from the truth.”
Of great interest to students of the Nazi regime and of the inexhaustible human capacity for evil.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-15-100556-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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
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
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