New Books
[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]
The Classical World – Robin Lane Fox
Ludecke was an obscure “old fighter” Nazi and intimate of Hitler’s who fell out on the wrong side of the Night of the Long Knives and managed to escape Himmler’s death list and flee Germany to write a sizable memoir covering the Nazi Party’s earliest days. Like Putzi Hanfstaengl’s Hitler: the Missing Years, Ludecke is gamely trying to cast himself in the best light even as he illuminates a less polished and amateurish provincial politician that was Hitler while the Fuhrer was clawing his way into power.
Fox is a well known classicist and biographer of Alexander the Great and his book is a sweeping review of the classical world from the end of the Greek dark age to the decline of Rome
