A German historian coaxes from history’s shadows the woman who for 14 years was the companion, lover and, near the end, wife of Adolf Hitler.
Görtemaker doesn’t spend much time with the childhood of Eva Anna Paula Braun (1912–1945), who began her life in middle-class obscurity and ended it in Hitler’s Berlin bunker as the Soviet army swept through the city. Not much is known about her girlhood, but as a teenager she went to work in the Munich photography studio of the Nazis’ official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. Braun probably began as a shop clerk, then gradually learned the trade and became an active amateur. In 1929, it was through Hoffmann that she met Hitler, whose Munich background, dramatic rise and fall Görtemaker swiftly chronicles—only rarely allowing the larger story to eclipse the smaller one. Because of the lack of documentation, the author often has to qualify with words like “probably” and “likely,” but she is a serious critic of others who have told Braun’s story and manages to keep out even a dash of compassion for the young woman who vigorously supported her lover, accepted and shared his vicious anti-Semitism, believed in the imperialist goals of the Reich and partied hard while the party lasted. Görtemaker shows how Hitler, who wished to portray himself as the selfless image of the Reich, a man with no low animal needs, kept Braun well hidden, rarely appearing with her in public (never alone) or allowing her to travel with him or his inner circle. Braun emerges as bright but vapid, energetic but soulless. As thorough and clear a look of a monster’s lover as we are likely to get.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59582-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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 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
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