A Hitler biography unlikely to be surpassed for quite some time.
An expert on Nazi Germany delivers a massive new biography of arguably the most monstrous leader in history.
Longerich (Modern German History/Royal Holloway Univ. of London; Goebbels: A Biography, 2015, etc.) addresses the many biographies that have come before, notably by Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest, which tend to characterize Hitler as a loner and an outsider, a “nonperson.” In contrast, Longerich examines Hitler’s “autonomous role as an active politician” in shaping the policies of his party. “I argue…that critical turning points in Hitler’s policies cannot be seen as the result of external constraints and structural determinants but were the product of decisions he forced through in the face of resistance and significant retarding factors,” writes the author. After Hitler’s first three nondescript decades, the post–World War I depression gave way to fury and rage at the German defeat, and he found expression as a propagandist for the extreme right-wing German Workers’ Party. Emerging a “magnificent failure” from his botched putsch, trial, and imprisonment, he set about creating a public image and political program with Mein Kampf, articulating especially his anti-Semitism and the conquest of “living space” in Eastern Europe. Although he was appointed chancellor in January 1933, his party, writes Longerich, “still had no more than one-third of the electorate behind it,” and it took “great political skill” over the next 18 months to transform the government into a Hitler dictatorship. The author deftly shows how Hitler actively “steered the course of events”—e.g., neutralizing the left, removing basic rights, eliminating trade unions, asserting total Nazi control of all clubs and associations, and “sorting out” the role of the two churches. As the momentum of terror grew, so did the inner conflicts and inconsistencies. Yet these did not undermine Hitler’s rule; on the contrary, the often cited “chaos of offices,” the author notes, “strengthened his personal position” and “allowed him…to enforce his political will directly as an autocratic dictator.” Throughout, the author wears his impeccable scholarship lightly, creating a fresh picture of one of history’s most written-about subjects.
A Hitler biography unlikely to be surpassed for quite some time.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-005673-5
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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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