To the Bitter End: An Insider's Account of the Plot to Kill Hitler, 1933-1944
Author: Hans Bernd Gisevius
When on July 20, 1944, a bomb—boldly placed inside the Wolf's Lair (Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia) by the German Anti-Nazi Resistance—exploded without killing the Führer, the subsequent coup d'état against the Third Reich collapsed. Most of the conspirators were summarily shot or condemned in show trials and sadistically hanged. The conspiracy involved a wide circle of former politicians, diplomats, and government officials as well as senior military men. The Resistance had started as early as 1933 and involved several planned putsches and assassination attempts. Hans B. Gisevius knew or met the major figures—including Beck, Canaris, Oster, Goerdeler, and von Stauffenberg—and barely escaped after the coup's failure. One of the few survivors of the German Anti-Nazi Resistance, Gisevius traces its history, from the 1933 Reichstag fire to Germany's defeat in 1945, in a book as riveting as it is exceptional.
New Yorker
The most exhaustive and authentic-sounding account of the conspiracy to kill Hitler.
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Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen
Author: Carl Hiaasen
Readers who eagerly anticipate each new Carl Hiaasen novel will relish this selection of his Miami Herald columns, written with the same dark humor and satirical edge as Tourist Season, Strip Tease, Stormy Weather, and the rest of Hiaasen's brilliant and nationally acclaimed fiction. Known for evoking the disastrously flawed paradise of modern South Florida, Hiaasen proves in these columns that facts can indeed be stranger than the fiction they inspire.
In addition to South Florida color and world-class journalism, readers of Kick Ass will find one of Florida's staunchest defenders in action, and they'll take great pleasure in watching him work.
Booknews
A collection of columns from the by the extremely popular mystery writer. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Kirkus Reviews
A public service to his many fans, this compendium of Miami Herald columns by best-selling novelist Carl Hiaasen (Lucky You, 1997, etc.) reveals an angry, alert civic muckraker in the pugilistic vein of Mencken or Royko. Though best known for his ribald crime fiction, with its meticulous universe of South Florida idiocy and venal conspiracy, Hiaasen cut his teeth as an investigative reporter, and this spirit is strong in both his chosen subjects and his wry attention to unforgiving evidentiary detail. As editor Stevenson notes, the collection's thrust, which she constructed by sifting through Hiaasen's 1300-plus columns, was to present his advocacy of "realistic growth and decent government in Florida." Along the way Hiaasen stops to gut innumerable big fish—crooked politicians, rogue cops, insensate tourists, swollen developers—within a rough chronology reaching back to the cocaine-crazed Reagan '80s. Although Hiaasen is a truly funny writer, a stern moral compass lies beneath his slapstick. His quixotic outrage regarding the despoliation of his home state (cf. the columnist/terrorist of his Tourist Season, 1986) is as unforgiving as an Uzi, as authentic as a Waffle House breakfast. Hiaasen's zestful attacks on Miami's many embarrassing or indicted leaders end up addressing the threats posed, for instance, by the crash overpopulation of Florida, epitomized by the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Andrew upon shoddy developments, a dire issue that pro-business boosters (e.g., The Mouse) labor to minimize. But even the loopier pieces (tame dachshund-eating alligators, Geraldo Rivera's faked drug raids) are informed by Hiaasen's unforgiving focus upon the social rot beneath the zanyfacade. Such columns, like his fiction, reveal Hiaasen as a crystalline, pitiless seer of human weakness in much the same vein as his Floridian forbears, Charles Willeford and Harry Crews. Deeply satisfying, both for what it reveals of the serious priorities of a supposedly light novelist and for the outrageous epic of Florida profiteering and entropy within.
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