Nuremberg: The Reckoning

Nuremberg: The Reckoning, William F. Buckley Jr.'s riveting historical novel about the 1945 International Military Tribunal that brought Nazi war criminals to justice, is driven by an illuminating synergy of fact and fiction. While drawing upon the record of furious, real-life events at Nuremberg and writing with mesmerizing authority about such participants as Herman Goering, Albert Speer, and Justice Robert Jackson (the United States' Chief Prosecutor at the Tribunal), Buckley provides readers a helpful, unifying entrée with his invention of the Reinhard family.

On the eve of Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland, building engineer Axel Reinhard and his American wife, Annabelle, finalize secret plans to flee their Hamburg home and, with son Sebastian in tow, emigrate to Phoenix, Arizona. There, Sebastian's grandmother will care for them; at least, that's the plan until the Gestapo forces Axel alone to stay behind. In subsequent years, Axel is pressured to design concentration camps while Sebastian grows into a smart, strapping officer in the U.S. Army. Assigned as a translator-interrogator at Nuremberg, Sebastian is not only thrust into the center of a legal maelstrom, but also finds himself at a crossroads of epic and personal history.

Buckley's work here is enriched by an edifying perspective on the enormous difficulties of developing coherent international law. Particularly fascinating are his insights into shaping a tribunal mentality that can survive generations of second-guessing: Was Nuremberg a perk for the war's victors? Or was it an imperative, delicately realized in the relative absence of legal antecedents? Buckley's superbly researched novel drops us squarely into a thicket of ideas, arguments, and reportage, while grounding our emotions in the Reinhards' collectively compelling story. --Tom Keogh