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Posner has told the story of Josef Mengele better than any others that I have read. It describes his experiments on humans at Auschwitz, his escape, and his life in South America as well as the Nazi hunters who tried to track him down. I learned a lot from this book. ( )

This isn't a straight-up biography. The author spends one chapter on Mengele's life before Auschwitz, and one (albeit very detailed and horrific) chapter on his activities in Auschwitz, and the rest on his life as a fugitive and the decades-long hunt for him. But accounts of Mengele at Auschwitz can be got from numerous other sources. I was deeply distressed by how many near-misses there were, how many times they could have caught him and didn't. It's no consolation that he was lonely and miserable most of his time in South America.

If you want to know the details of Mengele's crimes, you'd be better off reading memoirs and stuff about Auschwitz that talk about him. But the pursuit of him, and the pursuit of other Nazi war criminals as detailed in this book (Eichmann was kidnapped off a Buenos Aires street by Mossad agents, for example), makes for interesting and illuminating reading. ( )