Reviews

Manhattan Book Review (August 2026)

A Snake on the Heart has more ambition than most wartime biographies dare risk. Patrick S. Wolfe is not simply reconstructing the life of Jan Jürgen Petersen, a Dutch SS collaborator who later remade himself in Canada as a foster parent and social worker. He is also writing about the unstable relationship between fact, trauma, self-mythology, and moral evasion. I found the book strongest when it refused the comfort of a clean verdict.

That refusal is built into the title image. Reflecting on Petersen’s wartime duplicity, Wolfe quotes him saying, “I saw myself as that snake.” It is an excellent encapsulation of the whole project: a man defined by concealment, charm, and damage, and a biographer who knows that exposing him will require more than archival diligence. Wolfe even calls the result “a reasonable approximation of the truth,” which I appreciated. Too many books in this territory mistake confidence for authority.

What gives the book its charge is Wolfe’s willingness to stay with contradiction. Petersen emerges not as a neatly paradoxical figure, but as a destabilizing one: victim and victimizer, rescuer and liar, spiritual guide and corrosive force. I was especially taken by the way Wolfe traces how wartime choices keep radiating through postwar domestic life, foster care, and family memory. The book is not satisfied with public history alone; it wants the afterlife of damage too.

I also admired the scale of the research. This feels like the work of someone who has spent years cross-checking stories, weighing testimony, and resisting the urge to settle too quickly for the most dramatic explanation. That seriousness matters.

What held it back for me was overgrowth. At more than 450 pages of main text, plus appendices, the book sometimes preserves so many avenues of inquiry that momentum suffers. Wolfe’s caveats are intellectually honest, but they can become repetitive, and the mystical thread occasionally diffuses the narrative instead of sharpening it.

A Snake on the Heart is a substantial, unsettling work. I came away less interested in whether Petersen can be finally solved than in Wolfe’s larger point: facts matter, but contradictions are often where a life becomes legible.

Reviewed By: Scott Olsen

The Prairies Book Review (June 26, 2026)

A meticulously researched exploration of collaboration, memory, and the elusive nature of truth…

Wolfe’s ambitious biography is a  searching and deeply researched portrait of a man who lived a double life. Jan Jürgen “John” Petersen was a respected Canadian social worker, foster parent, and spiritual mentor. Before emigrating to Canada, however, he had served in the Dutch SS and the Sicherheitsdienst during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. As Wolfe reveals, Petersen occupied a morally ambiguous world in which he assisted both the German authorities and, at times, the Dutch Resistance, contributing to some horrors, including the Holocaust, while mitigating others. His wartime record resists simple judgment, and Wolfe wisely refuses to force it into one.

Drawing on more than four decades of research, Dutch archival records, interviews, and family testimony, Wolfe reconstructs Petersen’s life with admirable care. Just as compelling is the author’s willingness to examine his own role in the story. Once Petersen’s admirer and confidant, Wolfe gradually discovers that the man he thought he knew had spent much of his life constructing alternate versions of himself. The biography thus becomes an investigation into memory, self-deception, and the elusive nature of historical truth. Wolfe presents Petersen as both victim and victimizer, a man whose troubled childhood, wartime experiences, and postwar imprisonment left wounds that shaped his relationships and prevented genuine self-understanding. The narrative is meticulously documented yet remarkably humane, balancing scholarly restraint with emotional insight.

A compelling and intellectually honest examination of one man’s moral contradictions and the biographer’s long pursuit of truth.

*  *  *

Midwest Book Review (Vol. 36, No. 8, August 2026)

Synopsis: Jan Jurgen (John) Petersen was a charismatic man who some thought of as a spiritual guru. Petersen’s charm helped him survive the five-year Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. But beneath his genial exterior was a darker side.

During World War II, he served in the Dutch SS and was also a member of the Schutzgruppe, a semi-military organization attached to the German army. He played these organizations against each other, assisting both the Germans and the Dutch resistance, contributing to some horrors, including the Holocaust, while mitigating others.

Years later, in Canada, he became a foster parent and a social worker. But the traumas he suffered before and during the war, and from his postwar imprisonment as a collaborator, sowed mental health issues that would affect him and those around him for the rest of his life, preventing him from accepting the truth about himself and learning from it.

From the mystical to the malevolent, Petersen’s life story illustrates the complicated and, at times, damaging threads that can bind us within our relationships.

For biographer Patrick Shane Wolfe, what initially was a remarkable fact-is-stranger-than-fiction story shifted over time to become “a cautionary tale, one that is bizarre and compelling and ultimately stark and mysterious”.

Critique: A singularly fascinating and deftly crafted biography that will be of particular and extraordinary appeal to readers with an interest in World War II themed histories, biographies and memoirs, “A Snake on the Heart: History, Mystery, and Truth: The Entangled Journeys of a Biographer and His Nazi Subject” by Patrick Shane Wolfe is an exceptional, emotionally and intellectually engaging read from start to finish. A singularly exceptional and unreservedly recommended pick for personal, community, and college/university library World War II Biography/Memoir collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists, it should be noted for students, academia, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that this hardcover edition of “A Snake on the Heart: History, Mystery, and Truth: The Entangled Journeys of a Biographer and His Nazi Subject” (9781771806183, $39.99) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $9.99).