At one time the ending to The Boys From Brazil might have been surprising to its readers. Today it’s doubtful that anyone would read the book without being aware of its premise. For this reason I’ve decided to ignore that 1 customer out of a million who made the slalom run between internet Boys From Brazil spoilers, found their way to my review, and wants a guy to avoid giving the mystery away.

Deep down in its soul, The Boys From Brazil is a murder mystery. Its story begins in 1974 at a restaurant in Sao Paul, Brazil. Slowly a group of Nazi hit-men convene around their leader, Dr. Joseph Mengele. The author’s use of Joseph Mengele (a real person known as the Angel of Death) provided the original readers a thrill that is lost today. Mengele went into hiding after World War II, eventually ending up in Brazil. Mengele died in 1979…The Boys From Brazil was written in 1976, so you can imagine someone reading the book knowing the Nazi Mengele was out there, perhaps in Brazil…and wondering.

I’m slowly straying away from the story, though. Mengele tells his hired hands that they are to kill 94 civil servants around the world who are approaching retirement, all on certain days. The scheme finds its way to a character named Yakov Liebermann (fictional, but allegedly based on Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal). Liebermann’s occupation is tracking down surviving Nazis, but due to the far fetched nature of Mengele’s scheme, he is skeptical of this "94 civil servants” idea for much of the book. The majority of The Boys From Brazil follows Liebermann as he solves the mystery of “Why 94 civil servants?”.

It turns out that Mengele was granted some of Adolf Hitler’s blood before he died…and, he has been able to produce 94 clones of Hitler that he’s placed all over the world in an effort to duplicate history. This plot twist provides a brief opportunity for Levin to discuss some of the pros and cons of cloning. He discusses the medical savings that cloned “superior citizens” would bring. He discusses the impact to nature…we could clone the best cattle, etc. In one sense, the current feel of the book shows us how little we’ve moved forward with the cloning issue despite the technological advances.

The book also points the reader in the direction of questions such as:

- “What if”…what if some sort of cloning is perfected, how much of a story like this is actually science fiction? …could heroes and villains of the past both be cloned?

- How much of your person is genetic and how much is based on the conditions surrounding you? For example, if Hitler grew up in a loving Canadian family, would he still have become the evil person he was.

Levin’s writing style is gripping at times, but overall this is a story carried along by plot, not by award winning prose. Additionally, if you’re interested in reading a novel about cloning, you’re probably not going to find much here that challenges your thoughts or sparks new ideas about cloning. This book has been kept alive and developed a very mild classic nature because it’s about cloning. Give Mengele another reason for killing his 94 civil servants and it’s likely this story would be forgotten by now.

The Boys From Brazil has a plot that is hard to forget. And, part of me is tempted to say that sometimes all you need is a story with a good idea. I doubt this one will keep you up late at night reading, but it probably will get you telling your buddy at work about the crazy story you just read. It’s one that I only mildly recommend.

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To read more on Joseph Mengele see the following articles:

Joseph Mengele: The Angel of Death (a brief overview) -
www.mengele.dk

Who Was Joseph Mengele? (slightly longer, but better) -
www.holocaust-history.org/short-essays/josef-mengele.shtml

Recommended: Yes