Mengele's Legacy
 David J. Weinberg
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Rutledge Books.com
  ISBN: 1582441855


An aged doctor in a German pharmaceutical company announces a cure for AIDS, & sends Dr. Isaiah Slesinger, America's preeminent protein biochemist, a message just before he's killed -- or is he?

When Izzy receives Dr. Heneke's warning he is catapulted into a dangerous & desparate hunt among competing scientists, company men with murky pasts & modern-day agents still intent on racial purity. Izzy already knows that the old story about how the HIV virus leapt from monkey to man isn't true, & when he learns that Heneke worked with the Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele as a young man, Izzy is even more sure that something else spawned the dread disease.

Izzy is an American Jew, driven by the guilt of having been born in a safe country & the memories of the Holocaust, where so many of his parents' families perished. Izzy's horror of the Nazi's intentions escalates when he learns from Pieter Heneke, that AIDS is the result of a vaccine designed by Mengele, which they tested in the concentration camps, before using it in 'The Final Solution' for Hitler's African Problem. Even after a lifetime in research science, Izzy cannot, at first, believe the conclusions that Dr. Heneke is suggesting.

Dr. Heneke insists that Mengele's research papers have survived & urges Izzy to follow their trail. Somewhere in those papers Heneke is sure Izzy will find a way to backtrack the path of the disease & perhaps find a way to halt its devastation. Except, Dr. Heneke warns Izzy that AIDS is actually a cover for something even worse that will, in the very near future, affect every one of us.

Mengele's Legacy is a scientific thriller that packs an historical wallop! There is a lot of technical data that went miles above my head although it didn't distract too much from the implications of the story; & those implications are not that far-fetched, given Hitler's distaste for non-Aryans.

David Weinberg's first foray into writing, while somewhat raw around the edges, has produced a startling, uncompromising hair-raiser, rich in personalities, venal & altruistic & loaded with frightening possibilities.

Mengele's Legacy is a complicated read -- lots of scientific explanations & staged deaths, killers coming out of the woodwork & ghosts around every corner, yet as a reflection on the obsessions we have about racial purity & the dread of disease, it is a fascinating read!

Engaging, scary & well done!
(03/17/02)

Rebecca