Candid, personal, laced with thoroughly haunting imagery.
Memoirs from the Eastern Front by an ordinary Wehrmacht soldier with an extraordinary grasp the horrors of war.
In a cogent introduction, British historian Max Hastings stresses that the enormity and ferocity of the land campaign between Germany and Russia, the true centerpiece of World War II, were, and still are, in good part lost on Americans. The strategy of the U.S.—a small land force with air superiority—was premised on Russia paying the price in blood to defeat Hitler. At war’s end, Allied dead totaled perhaps one million citizens; the Soviets lost 27 million. U.S. and British forces killed a combined 220,000 German troops; the Russians killed three million and also shot 167,000 of their own troops attempting to flee the battlefield. Introspective Private Reese records his disdain for military service as well as his acceptance of its inevitability, and sets down in page after graphic page the absurdity of the war and his amazement at his own ability to sometimes revel in it (often drunk). After looting a captured train of spirits and food, he writes, “we…whooped and skipped over the rails and danced in the cars…made a Russian woman prisoner dance naked for us, greased her tits with boot polish and got her as drunk as we were.” In the aftermath of a night battle, however, he starkly recalls the faces of the dead and contemplates what is gained by fighting: “If I fell tomorrow, life would go on without me…thousands more were ready to work and to bring the task to completion, to quarrel with destiny, and prevail or, like me, fall by the wayside.” After a furlough, Reese returned to the Front and was killed in 1944; his diary was preserved for decades by his mother.
Candid, personal, laced with thoroughly haunting imagery.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-13978-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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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