{"id":44334,"date":"2015-04-04T04:59:38","date_gmt":"2015-04-04T04:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=44334"},"modified":"2015-04-04T04:59:38","modified_gmt":"2015-04-04T04:59:38","slug":"new-books-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=44334","title":{"rendered":"New Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

[by Mark Safranski<\/strong>, a.k.a. “zen<\/strong>“]<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\"\" \u00a0\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\"\"<\/p>\n

The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft ad the Call of National Security<\/strong><\/a> by Bartholomew Sparrow<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The Fall of the Athenian Empire<\/strong><\/a> by Donald Kagan<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The Memoirs of Ernst Rohm<\/strong><\/a> by Ernst Rohm<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Heinrich Himmler<\/strong><\/a> by Peter Longerich<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Origins of the Final Solution<\/strong><\/a> by Christopher Browning<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The Hitler Book: The Secret Dossier Prepared for Stalin<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0by Henrik Eberle<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Some new books….<\/p>\n

The bio of Brent Scowcroft<\/strong>, if my impressions from picking up and opening to two random sections are valid, is going to be very. very good (they were on Scowcroft’s estimation of the working relationship of Henry Kissinger<\/strong> and Richard Nixon<\/strong> and Scowcroft’s strategic adice to the first President Bush during German reunification). I was very impressed both with Sparrow’s prose and his ability to let Scowcroft’s voice shine through the text.<\/p>\n

I’m a fan of the pessimistic\u00a0Donald Kagan<\/strong><\/a> and recommend his Yale Open Courseware<\/strong> series on Ancient Greece<\/a>\u00a0from time to time to my own students who show an interest in the Classical world. One of Kagan’s students, now an academic nautical archaeologist, John R. Hale<\/strong><\/a>, also produced a fine history of the Athenian navy and the intertwining of\u00a0thalassocracy, empire and the Radical Democracy <\/a>and I recommend that book to my students as well.<\/p>\n

The next three books are related. \u00a0Last year I read the frequently useful, but also at times turgidly tedious<\/a>, I Knew Hitler<\/strong><\/a>, by Kurt G. W. Ludecke<\/a>.<\/strong>\u00a0The cause of Ludecke’s downfall with his semi-friend Adolf Hitler<\/strong> was the former’s constant embrace and enthusiastic promotion of the populist roughneck, leftist and “idealist” figures in the Nazi<\/strong> Party, like Ernst Rohm<\/strong>, the Strasser brothers<\/strong><\/a> and Alfred Rosenberg<\/strong> <\/a>and Ludecke’s belief that the “movement” came before the Fuhrer. Ludecke dedicated his massive memoir to the memory of Rohm, who was the catalyst between the old Freikorps<\/strong><\/a> paramilitarism of the old German nationalist Right and its hideous and radicalized offspring, National Socialism<\/strong><\/a>. Rohm is a key figure in the development of Nazism and a complicated one, being one of the few early Nazi leaders to have been on familiar (“Du”) terms with Adolf Hitler and his sudden fall had wider implications than were realized at the time – including inspiring Stalin to reshape Soviet society with terror and murder \u00a0(“Hitler, he shows us how to deal with political opponents!”).\u00a0Rohm’s memoir has been partially translated into English and deals with the early years when the Nazis were but one extremist party in an ecosystem of radical right German politics.<\/p>\n

Peter Longerich is one of the top German experts on the Holocaust<\/strong> <\/a>and it is fitting that he has completed a monumental biography of Rohm’s former deputy, Heinrich Himmle<\/strong><\/a>r, Reichsfuhrer-SS<\/a> and the chief implementer of the Holocaust of European Jewry. Chris Browning, another expert on the Holocaust also has much to say on the role of Himmler and competing Nazi functionaries in the evolution of genocide as a state policy of the Third Reich<\/strong><\/a>. Finally, The Hitler Book<\/strong> was an NKVD<\/a>\/MGB<\/a><\/strong> top secret analysis put together by Soviet intelligence for Josef Stalin, mirroring, to a small extent, the OSS<\/strong> psychological profiling of Hitler <\/a>and top Nazi leaders during the war.<\/p>\n

Recently, T. Greer<\/strong> of Scholar’s Stage<\/strong><\/a> blog asked me how many of the strategy related books on my shelves had been read vs. being in the antilibrary<\/a>. The answer was “most”. My antilibrary tends toward history and biography where I buy books more quickly than I can read them, while more instrumental books are bought and read shortly thereafter. I also trend toward “collecting” in Soviet studies, classical antiquity, Second and Third Reich Germany, US diplomatic history and books related to the Nixon administration.<\/p>\n

What are you reading and buying these days?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“] \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft ad the Call of National Security by Bartholomew Sparrow The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan The Memoirs of Ernst Rohm by Ernst Rohm Heinrich Himmler by Peter Longerich\u00a0 The Origins of the Final Solution by Christopher Browning The Hitler Book: The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[420,133,343,445],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-book","category-readers","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44334"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44359,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44334\/revisions\/44359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}