Longerich’s book is overly long and even plodding, but it is essential: it paints a definitive portrait of a man whose name...
Thoroughly researched, massive biography of one of the chief powers behind Hitler’s throne.
It is perhaps literature’s loss, but certainly humankind’s, that Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) abandoned his attempts to make a living as a writer and instead attached himself to the firebrand-cum-spectacle Hitler. As Goebbels, in an early, mawkish piece, wrote, “All modern artists…are to a greater or lesser degree insane—like all of us who have active minds.” As is his custom, Longerich (Modern German History/Royal Holloway Univ. of London; Heinrich Himmler: A Life, 2012) draws on psychology to characterize Goebbels as a classic narcissist, though one of real ability and accomplishment. He may not have been a first-rate writer, but he had a sharp mind and a strong sense of resolve, all of which he put to use as the Nazi state’s chief propagandist. In the first third of the book, the author charts the development of that ideology and the growing connection between Hitler and Goebbels, a friendship that suffered from tensions that haunted the lieutenant. As he wrote in 1934, “Führer does not call at supper time. We have the feeling that somebody is influencing him against us. We are both very pained by it. Go to bed with a heavy heart.” Hitler must have had other things on his mind, and though often slighted, Goebbels proved a loyal assistant. Of particular interest is Longerich’s account, late in the book, of efforts among Hitler’s chief aides to forge separate peace treaties with the soon-to-be-victorious Allies, with Goebbels angling for a concord with the Soviets. Close though Goebbels was to Hitler, he was never able to present the proposal, and the Nazis continued to wage a ruinous two-front war. A schemer and masterful manipulator, in short, Goebbels was seldom able to sway the chief object of his attention.
Longerich’s book is overly long and even plodding, but it is essential: it paints a definitive portrait of a man whose name has become a byword for complicit evil, and deservedly so.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1400067510
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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
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
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