A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition.
Penetrating biographies of Hitler and 21 other Germans who played important roles in Nazi-era atrocities.
Evans, author of the Third Reich Trilogy and other acclaimed books of German history, offers these eye-opening portraits of the heart of evil in an effort to understand what kind of people fell under Hitler’s spell. The subjects include the “Paladins,” top Nazis such as Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels; “Enforcers,” such as Rudolf Hess, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann; and “Instruments,” including filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and military officer Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb. “What had happened to their moral compass?” asks the author in this robust historical investigation. “Were they gangsters acting with criminal intent?” Were they “ordinary Germans” or “deviants” of some kind? Seeking answers, Evans thoroughly examines each of his subjects’ early years, their reasons for joining the Nazi party, what they did in the war years, and their postwar fates. Common denominators include a desire to find someone to blame for the loss of World War I and for the Great Depression, as well as the belief that a strong leader could return Germany to its rightful place in the world. Tellingly, few ever showed remorse for their deeds. Hitler’s virulent antisemitism and his charismatic speaking style combined with ruthless opportunism to bring him to power, even though the Nazis never attained a majority of the electorate in a fair election. Hitler’s delusion that Germany could fight three much larger powers—the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the U.S.—was widely shared among Germans, though its effects were exacerbated by their leader’s constant overruling of his generals and the derangement of his later years. The author avoids drawing parallels to any current political figures or movements.
A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780593296424
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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