Currently Reading: July-08
Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris by Ian Kershaw
Hardcover: 845 pages
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company (1-Jan-99)
ISBN-10: 0393046710
ISBN-13: 978-0393046717
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #95,383 in Books
Source: Gift from Frank
About this book, Publisher’s Weekly wrote:
‘We surely need books like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners that examine German society as a whole in an effort to understand how Hitler came to power and held it for so long. But we also need classic, political biographies that focus on the dictator himself. Kershaw’s book, the first volume of a projected two-part biography, pays some attention to how ripe a demoralized Germany was for demagoguery after the Treaty of Versailles, but the author’s focus is on Hitler and his political career — the decisions he made as he rose to power and those he made once he attained it. What distinguishes this effort is the extent of documentation as Kershaw, a professor of history at the University of Sheffield, exploits the full Goebbels diaries and texts of early Hitler speeches only recently made accessible. Also notable is the portrait Kershaw draws of Hitler as surprisingly remote from the thuggery, greed and corruption of his followers, high and low, even as he actively encouraged the development of a cult of personality. Kershaw closes with an examination of Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland, a fait accompli made possible by the timidity and disarray of Germany’s supine neighbors. Had the French marched, Hitler said later, “we would have had to withdraw… with our tails between our legs.” By 1936, Kershaw writes, events had substantiated Hitler’s hubris. A “nemesis” (subtitle of the next volume) would in reality not emerge before 1941. Kershaw’s massive work (made somewhat too massive by some repetition) is valuable for the rigor with which it portrays Hitler not as some supernatural evil force ejected into history from beyond but as a thoroughly natural figure — evil, surely, but historically evil.‘
—Publishers Weekly
Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis by Ian Kershaw
Hardcover: 1210 pages
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company (Sep-01)
ISBN-10: 0393322521
ISBN-13: 978-0393322521
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #27,163 in Books
Source: Gift from Frank
About this book, Booklist wrote:
‘George VI thought him a “damnable villain,” and Neville Chamberlain found him not quite a gentleman; but, to the rest of the world, Adolf Hitler has come to personify modern evil to such an extent that his biographers always have faced an unenviable task. The two more renowned biographies of Hitler — by Joachim C. Fest (Hitler) and by Alan Bullock (Hitler: A Study in Tyranny) — painted a picture of individual tyranny which, in the words of A.J.P. Taylor, left Hitler guilty and every other German innocent. Decades of scholarship on German society under the Nazis have made that verdict look dubious; so, the modern biographer of Hitler must account both for his terrible mindset and his charismatic appeal. In the second and final volume of his mammoth biography of Hitler — which covers the climax of Nazi power, the reclamation of German-speaking Europe, and the horrific unfolding of the final solution in Poland and Russia — Ian Kershaw manages to achieve both of these tasks. Continuing where Hitler: Hubris 1889-1936 left off, the epic Hitler: Nemesis 1937-1945 [sic] takes the reader from the adulation and hysteria of Hitler’s electoral victory in 1936 to the obsessive and remote “bunker” mentality that enveloped the Führer as Operation Barbarossa (the attack on Russia in 1942) proved the beginning of the end. Chilling, yet objective. A definitive work.‘
—Gilbert Taylor
This is a fabulous two-volume achievement and I’ve been enthralled for a couple of weeks with them both. Highly recommended. Should be required reading, for high school or at least in college. ★
• 612 Words written by Steve @ 12:15 | 14-Jul-08 in Non-Fiction • Critique It
The Iron Kingdom
Iron Kingdom by Christopher Clark
Hardcover: 800 pages
Publisher: Belknap Press (29-Sep-06)
ISBN-10: 0674023854
ISBN-13: 978-0674023857
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #24,062 in Books
Source: UCBerkeley Library Loan
About this book, the Daily Telegraph wrote:
‘The story of Prussia is one that has been told many times, but seldom as intelligently, elegantly and interestingly as it is here. Christopher Clark has written a monumental history of a state that started from small beginnings as the Mark of Brandenburg, grew in size, violence and pretensions, and ended up being destroyed forever in 1947, when the victorious Allies decided they had had enough of this troublesome phenomenon … The bulk of a fascinating text, littered with intriguing detail and wry observation, focuses on this transformation in the 200 years from the bloody Thirty Years War in the 17th century (which cost Prussia half its population) to the creation by the Prussian nobleman Otto von Bismarck of a German Empire in 1871…Clark has written a masterly synthesis of [the] many disparate strands in a long and ultimately forlorn history.‘
—Richard Overy
It’s a great book, right up my alley — the arcana of German history. Sometimes it gets bogged down a bit in too much arcana of Prussian electoral bureaucracy, but it is a classic and enjoyable read, nonetheless. ★
• 209 Words written by Steve @ 14:18 | 29-Dec-07 in Reading • Critique It