!UBC plus 4 other things
Nov. 11th, 2011 12:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyFirst! Publishers Weekly gives Somewhere Beneath Those Waves a starred review. (OMG ELEVENTY-ONE!!!1!1!)
ETA: since a couple people asked, and since apparently I am drifting along, lonely as a cloud, without a clue as to the correct answer: YES, this book will have both paper and electronic versions, and the e-book should be available near to the release date for the paper book (which is November 22).
!UBC:
Lukacs, John. The Hitler of History. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.
I had to stop reading this book on page 125 because all it was doing was making me angry. It wasn't so much the weird semi-covert Hitler rehabilitation as it was the way that Lukacs made his arguments by ignoring half the facts. For instance, in talking about the Röhm "putsch,"* he conveniently forgets to mention that THERE WAS NO PUTSCH, making it sound as if the murder of the SA leaders was in response to an actual attempted coup instead of in response to an on-going, dangerous, but relatively inchoate political inconvenience. He exhibits the "extraordinary popular outpouring of support" of the Nazi Winterhilfe charity (98) without mentioning the fact that support for Winterhilfe was pretty darn near compulsory in an Orwellian neighbors-policing-neighbors way. And that's his method, over and over and over again. He selects the half of the facts that make Hitler look better and ignores the rest. Also, although he footnotes like a fiend, he doesn't footnote properly, so that when he says, for instance, "From 1932 to 1939, the number of suicides committed by Germans under twenty dropped 80 percent during the first six years of the Hitler regime (from 1,212 in 1931 to 290 in 1939)" (98), he doesn't footnote it. He doesn't say where he got the information, how "suicide" is being defined, or whether--as just another random example of how partial and misleading this statistic is--"Germans under twenty" includes German Jews or not.
(I also find Lukacs' politics personally off-putting, but I'd be able to put up with that if only his history was worthy of respect.)
And I'm doubly disappointed because I would really like to read a book that does what Lukacs purports to be doing--comparing and analyzing the biographies of Hitler written in the last 50 years. That's a meta-discussion I very badly want someone to provide for me, but this book isn't it.
---
*Die Nacht der longen Messer, the Night of the Long Knives: because there's nothing more quintessentially Nazi than this romantic name for a bloodbath--die Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, is another perfect example. (Wikipedia has a picture of a destroyed synagogue which is horribly compelling.)
Fountain pen geeks, what do you think about Pelikan inks, particularly the ones available in cartridges? I have been very disappointed in the royal blue, which is a nice enough color but fades horribly--and since I want my inks dark and vivid, this drives me nuts. Should I try any of the others, or should I just give in to my own geekiness and take a bottle of Noodler's Squeteague to live in my desk at work?
A reminder:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala and I will be reading at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge MA at 6 p.m. on Saturday, November 19. Free and open to the public, so please come out!
And, for a fifth thing and happy Friday, have some lovely pictures of wet fishing cat kittens
ETA: since a couple people asked, and since apparently I am drifting along, lonely as a cloud, without a clue as to the correct answer: YES, this book will have both paper and electronic versions, and the e-book should be available near to the release date for the paper book (which is November 22).
!UBC:
Lukacs, John. The Hitler of History. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.
I had to stop reading this book on page 125 because all it was doing was making me angry. It wasn't so much the weird semi-covert Hitler rehabilitation as it was the way that Lukacs made his arguments by ignoring half the facts. For instance, in talking about the Röhm "putsch,"* he conveniently forgets to mention that THERE WAS NO PUTSCH, making it sound as if the murder of the SA leaders was in response to an actual attempted coup instead of in response to an on-going, dangerous, but relatively inchoate political inconvenience. He exhibits the "extraordinary popular outpouring of support" of the Nazi Winterhilfe charity (98) without mentioning the fact that support for Winterhilfe was pretty darn near compulsory in an Orwellian neighbors-policing-neighbors way. And that's his method, over and over and over again. He selects the half of the facts that make Hitler look better and ignores the rest. Also, although he footnotes like a fiend, he doesn't footnote properly, so that when he says, for instance, "From 1932 to 1939, the number of suicides committed by Germans under twenty dropped 80 percent during the first six years of the Hitler regime (from 1,212 in 1931 to 290 in 1939)" (98), he doesn't footnote it. He doesn't say where he got the information, how "suicide" is being defined, or whether--as just another random example of how partial and misleading this statistic is--"Germans under twenty" includes German Jews or not.
(I also find Lukacs' politics personally off-putting, but I'd be able to put up with that if only his history was worthy of respect.)
And I'm doubly disappointed because I would really like to read a book that does what Lukacs purports to be doing--comparing and analyzing the biographies of Hitler written in the last 50 years. That's a meta-discussion I very badly want someone to provide for me, but this book isn't it.
---
*Die Nacht der longen Messer, the Night of the Long Knives: because there's nothing more quintessentially Nazi than this romantic name for a bloodbath--die Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, is another perfect example. (Wikipedia has a picture of a destroyed synagogue which is horribly compelling.)
Fountain pen geeks, what do you think about Pelikan inks, particularly the ones available in cartridges? I have been very disappointed in the royal blue, which is a nice enough color but fades horribly--and since I want my inks dark and vivid, this drives me nuts. Should I try any of the others, or should I just give in to my own geekiness and take a bottle of Noodler's Squeteague to live in my desk at work?
A reminder:
matociquala and I will be reading at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge MA at 6 p.m. on Saturday, November 19. Free and open to the public, so please come out!And, for a fifth thing and happy Friday, have some lovely pictures of wet fishing cat kittens
