Short takes: Nonfiction

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Helga Schneider: Let Me Go: My Mother and the SS

It's reminiscent of Bernard Schlink's The Reader, but this story is true, as I had to keep reminding myself. It's a memoir, or perhaps more accurately, a report: of a 60-year-old daughter's final visit, in 1998, to her 90-year-old mother, who had been a member of the Waffen-SS, one of the fearsome guards of Auschwitz-Birkenau. This is only the second time the daughter, Schneider, has seen her mother since 1942 when she was 4, when the mother left her and her baby brother. "Our mother had abandoned us to join the SS," Schneider writes.

As the narrative shifts back and forwards between the "now" of the rest-home and the years of Hitler's Reich, this slim book reveals a harrowing tale of destruction on both the small and large scales. At the core of it all lie crucial, complex issues of moral responsibility. Schneider insists on the guilt of this now-aged woman, proud and unrepentant to the last, still dressing in the same colour as her guard's uniform, with a small hoard of stolen Jewish jewellery in her bedroom, and revealing her crimes of hatred in the camps.

The author also reveals a new category of war victim: the children of the Reich unwillingly exposed to shame and horror, abandonment and physical hardship. The monsters of the camps, we see, can only have been monstrous parents, too.

Schneider's own emotional turmoil drags the narrative in places yet, in the end, it's her thwarted hope for some sign of contrition, and her irrational yet all-too-human longing to find maternal love that accentuates the sordid inhumanity of both her mother and the regime.

(William Heinemann, $34.95)

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Deborah Hayden: Pox: Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis

"If Oscar Wilde was correct when he said that 'history is merely gossip', then Pox is history at its best," the reviewer in the New England Journal of Medicine said, which gives some idea of the wonderfully anecdotal readability of this historical study of the disease and its influence on our culture.

It's certainly a view of history not quite like any other: Hayden goes looking for pox - syphilis - and finds it all over the place, especially lurking behind the work of many geniuses: Baudelaire, Schubert, Schumann, Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Mozart and Tolstoy. She detects it in the lives of many men who have shaped the world, such as Columbus (the first European syphilitic, she postulates), Stalin and Hitler.

Some critics claim she romanticises the "creative euphoria" of the disease, and others that her reasons for claiming some of her subjects - Beethoven, President and Mary Lincoln - as victims, are provocative. Very readable nonetheless.

(Basic Books, $44.95)

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David Starkey: Six Wives: The Queen of Henry VIII

Just what the world needs, you might think. Yet Starkey, who has already published several books on this era that he considers "a turning point in English history second only to the Norman conquest", brings to this already well-stocked corner of the bookcase an offering that is fresh, lively and, he insists, contains both new evidence and new interpretations.

This is a huge book, more than 800 pages, and, while Starkey has a great sense of story and a colourful take on the full range of stereotypes represented by Henry's wives - "the Saint, the Schemer, the Doormat, the Dim Fat Girl, the Sexy Teenager and the Bluestocking" - there is so much period detail that this is probably one for the Tudor fanatic.

(Vintage, $34.95)

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Mervyn McLean: To Tatau Waka: In Search of Maori Music 1958-1979

From 1958 onwards, McLean recorded around 1300 items of traditional Maori chant. Many of them would have been lost had he not, as a student, ventured out into what was for him (and most of Pakeha New Zealand) the utterly unknown Maori world, armed with his tape-recorder (a new invention) and musical-notation skills. Here he tells the stories of those years, and the generosity of the people who helped him along the way. "Whenever knowledgeable singers died, some of their songs went with them," he writes, indicating the sheer urgency of his task. A CD is included with this fascinating account of a world thankfully not forgotten.

(AUP, $39.99)