Saints and Villains

March 1, 1998
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Protestant theologian, philosopher, and author executed in 1945 for his role in a plot to assassinate Hitler. In this first novel, the title of which is drawn from Bonhoeffer's Ethics, Giardina re-creates Bonhoeffer's story, from his privileged childhood in Berlin, through his travels abroad both before and during the war, to his final days in an interrogation prison. Fiction should have provided Giardina with the means of exploring Bonhoeffer's essence and engaging the reader in an understanding of his beliefs and motives. While Giardina captures Bonhoeffer's aloof and abrasive style, she fails to create a heroic or even compelling central character. Not all lives are suitable to fictional biography, and as Giardina herself writes in a postscript, "a collection of facts does not make an engaging story." Yet Bonhoeffer's story, told from a different perspective, could have been an epic morality tale of World War II. Recommended where interest warrants purchase.--Caroline M. Hallsworth, Cambrian Coll. Lib., Ont.

February 15, 1998
Giardina fictionalizes the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the outspoken Lutheran who died in a Nazi death camp, to show clearly such major polarities of the human condition as right and wrong, life and death, love and fear, family and nation. Young Dietrich studies theology at New York's Union Theological Seminary and there begins to wrestle with the question that haunts him the rest of his life: Is it acceptable to commit a sin in order to prevent a greater evil? After graduation, he returns to Germany and discovers it dramatically changed under Nazi rule. Soon, he is speaking out against Hitler's policies. This becomes increasingly dangerous, but he cannot stand and watch. He becomes involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, which fails, leading to imprisonment and eventual death at Flossenburg. Giardina does not draw a simple lesson from Bonhoeffer's story, which she has altered slightly for greater narrative coherence, but instead illuminates the web of moral decisions within which we all exist. A compelling, frightening, yet beautiful novel, written with passion, understanding, and eloquence. ((Reviewed February 15, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)