Readers of this blog may already be aware of my deep affection for the thousand-plus-page tome The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, journalist William Shirer’s invaluable 1960 history of Hitler and his Germany. It was with great delight, then, that I was made aware of a history of that history, Steve Wick’s The …
Tag Archive: history
May 03 2011
Darwin’s Mischief, Through Antebellum Eyes
In 1860, botanist Asa Gray reviewed the brand new book, On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, for the Atlantic Monthly, and it is a fascinating read. Not least of all for what about it induces cringing to modern liberal eyes: The prospect of the future, accordingly, is on the whole pleasant and encouraging. It is only the backward …
Dec 06 2010
Lest We Forget: Thoughts on “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”
The edition that I own of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich advertises that the book is one that “shocked the conscience of the world.” I saw this mainly as an indication of what the book must have meant to a public that might not have been as familiar with the crimes of …
Aug 23 2010
Clearing the Smoke from History’s Horrors and Heroes
I’ve just read Nicholson Baker’s take on the first years of World War II, Human Smoke, and it is certainly unsettling. But I have come across a couple of reactions to the book of late that complain that Baker is trying to convince the reader that WWII was a bad war that should never have been …
Jan 29 2010
Bryson’s “At Home”: A Delightful Slog through Human Misery
About halfway through Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, one can’t help but come to a couple of stark conclusions. One, that most of humanity’s domestic life, for the vast majority of time time we had domestic lives, was full of suffering and misery the likes of which we moderns can barely imagine. Two, …
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