timbawolf

Good Cultural History; Bad Narration

Revisado: 04-22-25

This wonderful, topically-organized book explores all the great cultural shifts, political crises, and creative movements within the Weimar era (1918-1933), from Expressionist films to the Treaty of Versailles to The Magic Mountain to the rise of the Nazis. Some sections are really excellent, like the explanation of why the Treaty of Versailles was so odious across Germany’s vast political spectrum, or the discussion of the shared language of the German right. But really, it’s all here—the things you expect (Caligari, Kurt Weill, hyperinflation) and plenty more that you don’t. It’s an astoundingly thorough treatment of an exciting period in modern history, told in an engaging style. You’ll learn about Weimar architectural theory, avant-garde collages, the first modern marriage manuals, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, and the best-selling novels that defined interwar Germany. You’ll meet leftist revolutionaries, conservative reactionaries, and everything in between. More than any history book I’ve ever read—and I’ve read quite a few—this book gives a sense of time and place that makes you feel like you’re actually encountering the people, ideas, and anxieties of the Weimar era as they faced an uncertain future in the Age of the Machine.

As a historian, author Eric D. Weitz’s prejudices are that of the typical American academic: basically, he thinks the German Left didn’t go far enough during the Weimar years in challenging social and cultural norms. He shakes his head at Weimar’s positive obsession with making sex socially beneficial rather than just a source of private pleasure, and chides German intellectuals for their hand-wringing over the rise of modern mass entertainment (why can’t the workers just have a little fun?). His treatment of right-wing figures is usually somewhat sarcastic, although not the point of being unfair. He grants that German Christianity, for example, had moral resources that should have made them wary of Germany’s (often anti-Christian) far right, and even acknowledges that many right-wing ideologues (even among the Nazis) were well-educated and highly cultured rather than common thugs. Because Weitz makes no effort to conceal his biases, and makes use of extensive quotations to back up his interpretations, it doesn’t become a significant issue. Just be aware that that’s his general take on the Weimar culture wars.

I do have two issues with the narration by Robert Slade. First, he oversells the tone of pompous moralizing when reading statements from doctors, politicians, and (especially) clergy. It’s plain bad acting, and the producer really should have stepped in and told him to tone it down. The texts speak for themselves—and anyways, Weitz makes it clear when he quoting someone merely to highlight the absurdity of their views. Second, I have a suspicion Slade lied about being able to speak German in order to get this job, because he constantly trots out a labored pseudo-German accent and just as constantly mispronounces the German words and names he’s using. To give two examples from the chapter on the rise of the far right, he pronounces Franz von Papen as “pay-pen” (it should be “pah-pen”) and Reinhard Heydrich as “hay-drik” (it should be “high-drik”). Besides being slightly annoying, it’s distracting to hear someone who’s obviously faking his way through a narration job he wasn’t qualified for. This book deserves better.

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Not “Sketches by Boz”

Revisado: 12-15-24

These are some nice little Dickens stories, but they were never published as Sketches By Boz. What we have here is a compilation of about 5 or so works from Dickens’s early career, mostly lesser-known. They don’t really have anything to do with each other apart from being published around the same time. So, if you’re worried about finishing Sketches by Boz, don’t worry; you already have. If you want a little more early Dickens wit, go ahead and spend the credit. Just know what you’re getting.

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Mythbusting the “Good Nazi”

Revisado: 03-16-24

The book is a good overview of Speer’s role within the Third Reich, especially in the economic sphere (see what I did there?). It’s main argument is that Speer deliberately cultivated a false image of himself as an apolitical technocrat, but that the evidence actually shows a man devoted to Hitler and the Nazi cause, a brutal exploiter of Jewish forced labor, and a dishonest self-promoter who avoided the hangman’s noose by pretending to be remorseful while also denying most of his own crimes. It also shows Speer as an empty, selfish man, without friends and without genuine values beyond a lust for power, fame, and money.

I do have a few critiques, which are more about style and structure than content. The book is very repetitive. Kitchen delivers identical assessments of Speer’s role and character over and over again, and he also uses repetitive word choice when is comes to construct sentences, such as “discussed… at discussions.” The book is organized topically within a broader chronological framework, so it’s sometimes difficult to tell what happened when, since the same historical ground keeps getting covered from a different perspective. These are all criticisms of Kitchen’s skill as a writer, however, and not a historian, so they don’t matter that much in the end.

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Informative and provocative, but with some obvious agendas

Revisado: 02-26-24

Heather is an entertaining writer and uses some fun pop culture references (notably the Godfather) to spice up what is otherwise a remote and opaque period of history. He does have several axes to grind (as another reviewer put it), notably on the ethnic character of Europe’s barbarian groups (in other words, that they were cultural groups with blood ties, not just large war bands) and his belief that religion is merely a disguise for political ambition. The former position is unobjectionable (his critics have an obvious modern political agenda of the own: legitimizing the EU) but the latter comes across as bigoted, especially when he boasts that he know nothing about theology, which is inexcusable for anyone writing about popes and bishops. So, just take his tendency to view all theological conflicts as political conflicts with a huge grain of salt. By his own admission, if he was missing the religious angle, he wouldn’t know it.

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Not a History

Revisado: 09-28-23

I spent 20 minutes writing an in-depth review on my phone and the Audible app flushed it into oblivion, so now you get the short, angry version. This book sucks. It's not "a history [of Europe] fro Troy to Augustine;" it's a look at how Greeks and Romans intrepreted and reinterpreted their own histories in different situations. If you don't already know much about Greek philosophy, or the social structure of Sparta, or slavery in the ancient world, or Roman family life, or basically anything that isn't a dead classics professor banging on about how Greek towns in Asia Minor used made-up connections to the Iliad as part of their diplomacy with the Athenians, you'll learn nothing from this book. The omissions are so numerous I couldn't begin to list them, but let me just repeat the one I consider the most damning: no Greek philosophy. None. Not a single paragraph on Platonism or Stoicism. I don't envy William Chester Jordan when he has to explain Aquinas in volume III to readers who know nothing about Aristotle.

Now, if you wanted to defend this book, you could point as that as a work of historiography (a topic that most ordinary people know almost nothing about), it's very interesting and informative, with lots of fascinating connections to contemporary culture ranging from I, Claudius to Freud to Black Athena. Which is true, except this isn't just some isolated book: it's the first volume in the Penguin History of Europe, a series that focuses mainly on social, cultural, religious, and political history; in other words, all the stuff Simon Price and his co-writer left out of this book! My guess is David Cannadine, the editor of the series, knew that Price was dying and didn't want to deny him the chance to finish this passion project before he kicked the bucket, even if it didn't really fit with the rest of the series. But I don't care. This a really good series and it doesn't deserve a off-topic passion project as an opener.

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Definitive history of the Early Republic

Revisado: 09-21-21

Somehow both the history of America's "great men" (read: Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton) and the history of a new nation and people at the same time. You really get a sense of how the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans shaped America and why different Americans were drawn to each movement. Well-written, and with great narration by Fass.

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An Odd Choice for the Audiobook Treatment

Revisado: 11-30-19

As a key for understanding Second Peter and an illuminating case for a first century "coming" of Christ in the destruction of the temple, the book is excellent. It's just an odd sort of book to make into a audiobook, given how niche and technical the subject matter is. Who is this for? The scholar or pastor would certainly prefer this work in print, while the ordinary reader (like me) will probably find the claim to "exposition" a little misleading. Leithart does explain the meaning of Second Peter, but he's mainly explaining how a certain perspective on the letter makes more sense than others. In other words, it's not primarily an exposition so much as a case for a certain approach to exposition. If that sounds interesting to you, you're probably the mystery audience of this audiobook. Enjoy.

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An Endorsement (and a Caution)

Revisado: 10-23-19

Imagine an Orthodox monk—his long, gray beard hanging gracefully over his ornate Schema—beating the crap out a middle school-aged atheist neckbeard and taking his lunch money.

That's what this book is, for better or for worse.

Nobody has a higher view of the scholarly emminence of David Bently Hart than David Bently Hart, and he turns his full powers against the intellectual lightweights of the New Atheist movement (and, eventually, their fellow anti-Christians among the Roman empire's pagan intellegentsia) in this apologetic essay. With extensive references both to secondary annd primary sources, Hart defends the revolutionary status of the Christian Revolution, both in the present and the past. To both the self-comforting myths of modern "science educators" and to the dishonest narratives of pagan virtue, Hart shows no mercy, brutally exposing their false foundations and historical distortions. While the historical nonsense peddled by New Atheists and modern apologists for Roman paganism certainly deserves his scorn, Hart could probably stand to learn a little from the early Christians himself.

To put it bluntly, Hart is a colossally arrogant person, imputing both intellectual and moral idiocy to everyonee who disagrees with him in the slightest—whether atheist, pagan, or Christian. There isn't a charitable bone his body. He's so thoroughly convinced of his own scholarly powers that he's often led into the antics of a schoolyard bully, relying more on name-calling and emotional appeals than anything else (see: his responses to critical reviiews of his recent book on universalism).

So, take everything Hart says with a pinch of salt. Atheist Delusions is a fun read, and an inspiring one at that, but remember that Hart brings the same sledghammer that he lays on the Dawkins crowd to every fight, and not every disagreement is a boulder that needs to be smashed.

Some are nails that just need a little tap.

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A Good Introduction

Revisado: 10-21-19

Evan's Third Reich Trilogy is essentially a primer for the uninformed, as he himself admits in the prologue to The Coming of the Third Reich. The series is a topical birds-eye view, addressing various aspects of life, politics, and culture under the Third Reich. This is both the book's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Those interested in narrative history will probably find Evan's approach of jumping from topic to topic frustrating (although the same approach would serve him well in his later survey of 19th-century European history for Penguin). Those that have proceeded beyond the Third Reich trilogy to reading Kershaw, Wachsmann, Longerich, etc. will likewise find the generalizations somewhat frustrating, although this had more to do with the nature of historical surveys than any deliberate mischaracterizations on Evan's part. Simple put, if you want an introduction to life in and under the Third Reich, look no further. If you're already familiar with the topic, you probably won't learn anything new, except perhaps from Evan's fascination with jokes and humour in the Third Reich, which is as insightful as it is delightful.

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The definitive Christmas Carol

Revisado: 10-21-19

This is it. You found it. The greatest version of Dicken's classic Christmas ghost story ever recorded. Don't hesistate. This is your new Christmas tradition. May the ghost of Frank Muller haunt your house pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

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