UBC: Lying About Hitler
Nov. 6th, 2011 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyEvans, Richard J. Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. Basic Books-Perseus Books Group, 2001.
Like The Case for Auschwitz, this is a book written by an expert witness for the defense in the libel suit David Irving brought against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 2000. In this case, the expert witness is the historian: Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University; his role in the defense was to assess Irving as a historian.
His findings, briefly stated, are that Irving manipulated and misrepresented historical facts and primary sources from the very beginning of his career, and always twisting in favor of Nazi Germany and against the Allies. He goes into some detail in his discussion, but as far as I was concerned, not nearly enough. I don't care particularly about the confusion in the media about who was on trial (many commentators thought that the trial was about Irving being denied free speech) or about Evans' experience of being cross-examined by Irving--which is not to say that wasn't a nightmare, because it totally was; it's just that what I want is the process by which Evans and his research assistants retraced Irving's steps and dissected his twisting of evidence.
That's a personal bias. Leaving it aside, this is a perfectly good book; eleven years after the trial, it's not particularly illuminating--and actually, I think that is because Evans doesn't go through his 700 page expert opinion and lay out everything he discovered about Irving's quote-unquote "historiography." This is a popular book about the Irving trial--in the sense that it is written for a "popular," i.e., casual audience, and as such, it's much more ephemeral than van Pelt's book, which is partly about the trial, but mostly about the evidence, and which is written for an assumed audience that wants all the minutiae and neepery. That audience would be me. I'm never satisfied with books that only give me the surface of their topic; what I want, always, is the gears and vital organs underneath. Evans gives me some of that, but left me twitching and hungry for more.
Like The Case for Auschwitz, this is a book written by an expert witness for the defense in the libel suit David Irving brought against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 2000. In this case, the expert witness is the historian: Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University; his role in the defense was to assess Irving as a historian.
His findings, briefly stated, are that Irving manipulated and misrepresented historical facts and primary sources from the very beginning of his career, and always twisting in favor of Nazi Germany and against the Allies. He goes into some detail in his discussion, but as far as I was concerned, not nearly enough. I don't care particularly about the confusion in the media about who was on trial (many commentators thought that the trial was about Irving being denied free speech) or about Evans' experience of being cross-examined by Irving--which is not to say that wasn't a nightmare, because it totally was; it's just that what I want is the process by which Evans and his research assistants retraced Irving's steps and dissected his twisting of evidence.
That's a personal bias. Leaving it aside, this is a perfectly good book; eleven years after the trial, it's not particularly illuminating--and actually, I think that is because Evans doesn't go through his 700 page expert opinion and lay out everything he discovered about Irving's quote-unquote "historiography." This is a popular book about the Irving trial--in the sense that it is written for a "popular," i.e., casual audience, and as such, it's much more ephemeral than van Pelt's book, which is partly about the trial, but mostly about the evidence, and which is written for an assumed audience that wants all the minutiae and neepery. That audience would be me. I'm never satisfied with books that only give me the surface of their topic; what I want, always, is the gears and vital organs underneath. Evans gives me some of that, but left me twitching and hungry for more.
