Nuremberg: The Reckoning FROM THE PUBLISHER
Nuremberg's Palace of Justice, 1945: The scene of a trial without precedent in history, a trial that continues to haunt the modern world. Leading the reader into the Palace is Sebastian, a young German-American whose fate is to be involved intimately with the lives and deaths of others - the father who disappeared mysteriously, the ancestors whose stories become vitally relevant, and some of the towering figures of twentieth-century legal history, including Justice Robert Jackson, Albert Speer, Hermann Goering, and the dark, untried shadow of Adolf Hitler. In a gripping account of warmakers who must face the consequences of their actions, Nuremberg: The Reckoning flows through Warsaw, Berlin, Lodz, Munich, Hamburg, and finally Nuremberg, as Sebastian, an interpreter-interrogator, comes to terms with his family legacy and his national identity.
FROM THE CRITICS
Book Magazine - Penelope Mesic
This fourteenth novel by the ceaselessly busy Buckley is far better than last summer's trivial Elvis in the Morning. Nuremberg is about a twenty-year-old American lieutenant named Sebastian Reinhard, who is serving as a translator at the Nuremberg trials. Sebastian fled Germany with his American mother as World War II began. His father, a German engineer, was forced to stay behind for reasons Sebastian only gradually discovers. Many stories featuring Nazis are lurid fantasies or overly intricate conspiracies, but this narrative is refreshingly sober, depicting a likable hero whose greatest exploit to date is working one summer as a guide at the Grand Canyon. Like his fellow officers, Sebastian sees the importance of his work, but he's gradually worn down by the combined horror and tedium of the trials. There is a modesty and reality about this life that makes it the ideal yardstick against which to measure the grotesquely enlarged evil of Hitler's Reich.
Library Journal
Within the flexible boundaries of a novel that has substance, style, and a firm grip on the plot, Buckley has fashioned a story of action against a real historical background the trials at Nuremberg. Sebastian Reinhard, a German-born American, becomes an interpreter at the War Crimes Tribunal and an interrogator of one of the Nazi Brigadef hrers. In this latter capacity, he learns disturbing truths about his national origin and about his father, an MIT-educated civil engineer who superintended the construction of an extermination camp. Buckley achieves a good working compromise between actual events and people (U.S. Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson, defendants Hermann G ring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, etc.) and the many fictional characters who weave in and out of his narrative. Before the powerful ending, every thread has been pulled remorselessly tight. This is National Review founder Buckley's 14th novel, and it's one of his best. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/02.] A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The 15th novel by the conservative intellectual godfather and gadfly is a brainy thriller cut from the same cloth as Spytime (2000): fast-moving and based on historical events only all too real. Civil engineer Axel Reinhart prepares to leave Hamburg with his wife Annabelle and 13-year-old son, Sebastian, for a stay in America. The Gestapo refuse Axel permission to leave Germany, and the narrator thereafter shifts to his family's years in America, with briefly juxtaposed glimpses of both Axel's unwilling involvement in Nazi projects and flashbacks to the histories of his own and (especially) his wife's families, in which we learn what Sebastian himself does not yet know: that he is of part-Jewish ancestry. The bulk of the story records Sebastian's growth to young manhood; his OCS training, and selection to work as a translator at the International War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg in the years 1945-46; and his eventual disillusionment as he learns what happened to the father he never saw again after leaving his homeland. Buckley creates vivid cameo portraits of such crucially involved historical figures as Hermann Goering and American Justice Robert Jackson, and matches them with in-depth characterizations of stoical, thoughtful Sebastian and of the steely, infuriatingly self-possessed concentration camp commandant (named "Amadeus"!) to whom he's "assigned." An enormous amount of information is packed into the story, and Buckley doesn't altogether solve the problem of mingling exposition with drama, especially in the early going. But the dialogue (always one of this author's strong points) is crisp and revelatory, and the dramatic momentum of the final hundred pages-in which the tribunalreaches verdicts and Sebastian finds in himself the capacity to rethink the imperatives of right and wrong-has a tumbling intensity reminiscent of Richard Condon's sardonic fictions. Literate, absorbing, and thought-provoking. Buckley at his best. Author tour
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