An often repetitive but powerful biography.
The life of the famed “Nazi hunter.”
Israeli journalist Segev (1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East, 2007, etc.) labors mightily to separate the facts from the myths surrounding Simon Wiesenthal (1908–2005). The author examines Wiesenthal’s horrifying accounts of his experiences in Nazi death camps during World War II, and he knocks down accusations spread by Wiesenthal's detractors that the postwar crusader actually had collaborated with Nazis. Wiesenthal's renown during his long life and after his death is tied largely to the stories of how he tracked down Nazi murderers of Jews and other ethnic victims—with Adolf Eichmann's capture and punishment leading the list. The fame derives in large part from Wiesenthal's own books as well as movies about him starring actors Laurence Olivier and Ben Kingsley. Although largely a Wiesenthal admirer, Segev demonstrates his subject's exaggerations, lies and seemingly bottomless vanity. Wiesenthal operated mostly from Vienna, Austria, after World War II, but traveled the globe as an investigator, lobbyist and public speaker. The biography moves beyond detailed—and sometimes tedious—controversies enveloping Wiesenthal's words and actions to consider such vital questions as who should be considered a war criminal, and for what offenses? “The hunt for Nazi war criminals and their prosecution entailed many basic legal and ethical questions,” writes the author, “and demanded new definitions of crime, guilt, responsibility, punishment and justice.” After all, many of the Nazi death-camp commanders claimed they were just following orders, as do soldiers from every nation that wages war. Segev also wisely examines a larger context insisted upon by Wiesenthal—that the Nazis exterminated not just Jews, but other groups such as Gypsies. Many Jewish leaders and Zionists in general found Wiesenthal's thinking offensive, but Segev gives him his proper due.
An often repetitive but powerful biography.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-51946-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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