Most Helpful Customer Reviews
32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
ACTUALLY, PRETTY GOOD, May 14, 2002
By A Customer
I thought this book was quite good, well-plotted, with characters to whom life happens, that is, characters who move the story forward without hugely contrived events. The things that happen to them seem like things that could happen, life wrapping itself around them unpredictably. The main character is Sebastian Reinhard, a well Americanized kid, who grows up and goes to Germany in the military, where he discovers some shocking family secrets--including a father who could stand up to help an individual, his friend, but who could not summon the strength to help a race, or at least, to refuse to be part of the brutal genocide despite his views. History brutalizes him; he feels compels to help one of the German prisoners, only to discover that he has been lied to again. It is excellent characterization, and good, complex storytelling. The historical actors--Goering, Speer, Robert Jackson, others--are convincingly presented, the moral problems well handled, the complex problems of trying to be good against evil in a world which is both so overwhelmingly corrupt and so banal is well-done. Not to criticize anyone else's views too much, but I read one review on this page that seemed to be of a different novel than the one I read so quickly and enjoyed so much. The book doesn't tell us new things about Nuremberg, or the Germans, but it personalizes the problems in a thoroughly convincing way. You could imagine yourself dealing with them, perhaps better, perhaps worse, than the participants in this story. I strongly recommend this book.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very Engrossing, June 9, 2002
Buckley does his usual nice job of putting everything together and giving us a cast of characters that are lively and entertaining. At first glance, this seems like it will be a mystery or novel with the Nuremberg trials after WWII the backdrop. But the author gives us so much background for the war crimes trials, and so much personal detail about some of the defendants and their feelings, it developes into an overview of the war crimes trials, with the story in the background. But the author does such a nice job of mixing the real-life characters with those of the fictional story, it turns into a very entertaining and engaging book. This would be a first-class place to start for anyone interesting in delving into what happened at the end of WWII, and how the Four Powers turned to this tribunal to handle significant questions about how to treat surviving Nazi leaders. Plus, of course, we can follow a nice story about a German-American family and how their young son, in the US Army, fits
into all the international politics of the time. A very engrossing book and one most of us will find it difficult
to put down.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A good novel exploring Nuremburg's troubling ambiguities, June 19, 2008
This review is from: Nuremberg: The Reckoning (Paperback)
Buckley tackles the dicey subject of the Nuremburg trials in what proves to be a pretty good book. Conservative readers will appreciate some of the troubling ambiguities he discovers in what tends otherwise to be seen as one of humanity's finer moral hours - most obviously, that the Russians, who sat in judgment, were guilty of almost all the same crimes as the Germans, and the other allies were guilty of some of them. That international law was more or less invented for the trial, and the defendants tried ex post facto, is another problem. It might have been more honest to do as Churchill wanted, and just to shoot them, which history would most likely have excused the victors for doing after the worst war in history. Documenting the Nazis' crimes, though, had its own value, not only in the courtroom of Nuremburg, but the courtroom of history.
The plot revolves around Axel, a German engineer who marries an American woman of German background, bringing her back to Germany in the 1920s where they have a son. On the eve of the war, Axel carefully and quietly plots a trip to the United States, purportedly to take their son to an American school, but actually to flee Germany. At the last minute, Axel is forced by the Gestapo to stay behind with no explanation to his family, who are allowed to leave. Soon they hear no more from him.
His son turns 18 in time to get drafted in the U.S. near the war's end, and his German-language ability brings him to Nuremburg as a translator. Sebastian - a bit like Buckley's Blackford Oakes, cool and dignified beyond his years - gains the trust of trial prosecutors led by Robert Jackson, assigned specifically to a fictional but plausible defendant who ran a concentration camp. Meanwhile, Axel's fate unfolds, as does the fateful history of Annabelle's German-born mother, and how they all tie together in the war's terrible maelstrom, coming together at Nuremburg to put Sebastian in a terrible dilemma. Buckley does a great job incorporating the politicking and backroom deliberations before and during the trial, as well as the Germany-in-ruins backdrop.
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