A sprawling history that ably fulfills its intention “to reposition economics at the centre of our understanding of Hitler’s regime.”
In the 1930s, writes Tooze (Economic History/Cambridge Univ.), Germany’s economy was comparable to Iran’s or South Africa’s today, of middling importance internationally but regionally influential. Well into the Hitler years, Germany still had 15 million people employed making traditional handicrafts or engaging in peasant agriculture—and well along, for all the mechanized blitzkrieg, German war-planners figured that the army would need to employ one horse for every four soldiers. Tooze opens with a footnote to history, namely, the planned sequel to Mein Kampf, in which Hitler projected that an Anglo-German alliance would conquer the east and fend off the threat that the US posed to Europe; Britain’s failure to jump at the opportunity meant that Hitler had to undertake the project with lesser partners. Tooze observes that the Nazi armaments program—made possible by defaulting on US loans and reparation payments—was the largest transfer of resources ever made in peacetime in a capitalist economy; even so, he adds, Germany lacked the resources financial and natural to sustain an army that could defeat all the enemies it courted. Though Hitler from the start had advanced an economic program meant to help Germany’s poor, and though he paid for the war machine not by taxation but by a steady project of rationing and “rationalization,” the chief beneficiaries of his policies were rich and major corporations such as I.G. Farben and Porsche. And anyone who paid attention could have seen the war coming: Though it was on its face economically ruinous, Hitler had demanded in 1936 that the “German economy must be fit for war within four years,” and the state and economy obliged as best they could.
A strong contribution to the historical literature surrounding WWII and the Nazi era; indeed, one of the most significant to arrive in recent years.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-670-03826-1
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
Categories: HISTORY | BUSINESS | WORLD | ECONOMICS | GENERAL BUSINESS | GENERAL HISTORY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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