RaveThe Wall Street JournalIts 800 scholarly pages are never dull ... [A] vast, engrossing history.
Stephen Koch
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalConcise and dramatic ... a riveting tale. Mr. Koch—novelist, biographer of Andy Warhol, sometime teacher of creative writing at Princeton and Columbia—is not the first to tell it, but he tells it with notable verve. Jonathan Kirsch in The Short Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan and Armin Fuhrer in his German-language Herschel (both published in 2013) give fuller, more considered historical accounts. Mr. Koch cuts to the essentials. In a work of fact that reads like fiction, with a novelist’s relish for incident and character, he brings his troubled, troubling protagonist to life.
