A disturbing portrait of one segment of German society in a time of national crisis.
Journalist Bruhns explores the life of her father, a German officer executed in 1944 for his complicity in the plot to assassinate Hitler.
To understand how Hans Georg Klamroth could have joined and then become disenchanted with the Nazis, the author, who was six at the time of his execution, has studied family letters, diaries, photographs and old home movies. She likens the prosperous Klamroths to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrook clan. Her research showed that HG, as he was known, served in the Prussian dragoons during World War I, worked abroad in Curaçao and Denmark in the family business and enjoyed an upper-class life of parties, women and horses in a militarist, nationalist milieu. At first HG viewed the rise of the Nazis with concern, but he joined the party in 1933. Bruhns reports with distaste that he did not object to the Klamroth clan’s written assertion of Aryan purity, nor did he protest book burnings or punitive anti-Semitic laws. In World War II he served first in Poland and then with German counterintelligence in Denmark. The author speculates that he aided the Danish resistance while there, and that when he served in Russia he became disillusioned about Hitler’s management of the war after the disastrous siege of Stalingrad. In 1943 he was back in Berlin, tasked with “preventive nondisclosure protection of military research projects,” in the dense prose of translator Whiteside. Bruhns is not certain who confided in her father about the plot to kill Hitler (she doubts it was his son-in-law, as claimed during the trial), but as a member of military intelligence, “saying nothing ha[d] become second nature”; he did not report the conspiracy. After the assassination attempt failed, he was arrested, swiftly tried and convicted, then hanged with deliberate slowness, so it took 20 minutes for him to be strangled to death.
A disturbing portrait of one segment of German society in a time of national crisis.Pub Date: May 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26281-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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