...an elegant and ambivalent book animated by an insoluble mystery.

Resolutely unflinching and ultimately illuminating.

Its 18 chapters are organized well, into the different roles Gönner played throughout his life, a table of contents that reads like a John le Carré collage.

[Bilger] builds a narrative that admits to its holes, that doesn’t shy away from its incompleteness while it still makes an effort, with the materials at hand, to understand life in wartime and the kind of people whose actions occupy that gray zone of morality.

Engrossing.

Exceptionally well-written and compulsively readable.

The author traveled to Europe repeatedly, researching archives and interviewing villagers, and the result is a vivid portrait of his grandfather and his times.

Bilger’s atmospheric account probes the complex ethical ambiguities of wartime Alsace and his mother’s harrowing childhood experience of the defeat and devastation of Germany, conveying both narrative strands with a fine moral irony couched in prose that’s both psychologically shrewd and matter-of-fact.