Reviews for Of love and wars

The average rating for Of love and wars based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-08-19 00:00:00 George Horton The biography does not do justice to its subject. George Sylvester Viereck was an interesting character. A German who moved to the US in the early part of the nineteenth century, he became the toast of the New York literary scene in his teens, an exemplar of modern poetry and playwriting, developing out of the decadent movement. (He was especially impressed by Oscar Wilde.) He made enemies during the Great War, when he propagandized in favor of the Germans. The 1920s did better by him--and he by it. He helped popularize Freud and psychoanalysis, as well as a lot of modern sex research--much of it based in German--which was breaking down the binary notions of gender. He wrote popular works on sexology, as the subject was called, and integrated its ideas into his fiction. He wrote a well-regarded long novel using the Wandering Jew theme. And he even won back some of the friends he had lost with his work during the earlier war. At the same time, he was falling in love with Hitler--looking past the Nazi's anti-Semitism, since he was not himself anti-Semitic, but loving the strong, charismatic leader. He ended up being jailed during World War II on what were technicalities regarding his propaganda efforts. One gets the sense that Viereck paid for the sins of others--Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh--who were also pro-German. While imprisoned, he wrote his most popular book,Men Into Beasts, which was about his time in jail. The biography tells all these stories, but does so from an Olympian Height, often refusing to name names because that would be too salacious. He makes definitive judgements and tosses of names that make him seem learned but are just obscure. Gertz wants you to know he is the smartest, most reasonable man in the room. Which is part of the reason he wrote this biography: to rescue Viereck from his image as an apostate, to show that his propaganda was not so different than the same propaganda being put out by the US and Great Britain--as Viereck's enemies even came to recognize. Mostly, too, Viereck was a literary man and even his political and sexual tastes were related to his literary views. The biography also relies to much on psychological theorizing, so much so that Viereck never seems to be a person, but just a personality type. His appreciation of Hitler, for example, is just chalked up to projection. All the complexity comes from varying responses to Viereck, not really from the man himself. Finally, the book suffers from its own history. Gertz wrote this biography back in the 1930s, but could find no publishers until someone with Prometheus (the publishing arms of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal, now known as CSI). As a result, there is a lot of information on the early part of Viereck's life, but later material gets a short shrift, comparatively. The end of the book is mostly a series of letters between Gertz and Viereck near the end of Viereck's life which have their own charms, I guess, but are not well integrated into the rest of the narrative.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-22 00:00:00 Penny Applegate very lovely, very slow, and very preachy.