To complete the lesson, you will choose a book from the titles listed below to read and evaluate it. All the titles listed reflect a different perspective on the history of imperial Germany and/or the Weimar Republic but continuing to develop the themes reflected in this lesson. The purpose of the book review is to broaden and deepen your knowledge of the themes and issues of the lesson while helping you develop your critical thinking-reading-writing skills as an advanced learner. The book review must be 1000 - 1100 words (approximately 3 - 4 pages) in length. Book reviews provide a concise analysis of the content and argument of the book and an evaluation of the book's contribution to the field. The point is not to write more, but to write concisely. This is a crucial element to keep in mind. A book review is NOT a book report in which you summarize the content of the book. A book review IS a critical assessment of the contributions that the author of the reviewed work has made to the field of scholarship. To do this, you must critically evaluate the author's intentions and purpose, thesis, contentions, and methods of analysis. The majority of your book review will be devoted to demonstrating that you understand the author's argument and how well the author made the case for her argument. You must read and think before your begin writing your review. According to historian Jacques Barzun, "The beginning, we know is important. The first [paragraph] should present an idea of interest to the readers . . . . If your first words are "This book . . ." they will not be able to distinguish your review from twenty others, and they will be entitled to conclude that you have not expended much thought on enlisting their attention. The opening statement takes the readers from where they presumably stand in point of knowledge and brings them to the book under review. The briefest possible description of its aim, scope, and place in the world therefore follows the baited opening sentence and completes the first paragraph. [Jacques Barzun, The Modern Researcher, 4th ed. (New York, 1985), 290.] Your book review should include the following: • • • • • • • • A bibliographic entry that identifies the author and full title, the author and full title, and the imprint (city, publisher, date of publication), your name, and course information A thesis that explains the significance of this work to the history of Nazi Germany framed by a strong introduction A brief summary of: o Who is the author? o What are the qualifications of the author? o What are the author’s reasons for writing the work? A description of the overall scope of the work A brief summary of the content and structure of the work An explanation of the types of sources the author used. An assessment of the quality of the evidence the author uses to support her/his arguments An assessment/evaluation of the author’s thesis, arguments and conclusions [hint: this is not simply a summary of what you liked or disliked about the book, but explanations, analysis, and implications about your assessment of the work] • • • An analysis of the significance and importance of the author’s conclusions to our understanding of themes of the lesson An assessment of what contribution the author makes to our understanding into the broader scope of the history of Nazi Germany. If you are reviewing a memoir or an eyewitness account, address as many of the above questions as are applicable. A work of fiction must be summarized (plot, characters, setting) and analyzed for its historical value. Remember, the above set of criteria for your review is not a laundry list of points that you simply jot down answers to and submit, but a guide to help you organize your thoughts into words. A book review, like all other historical contributions, is a crafted analysis that tells a story about the contributions and significance of the work to our understanding of the history of Nazi Germany. Choose one of the titles below to review: • Allen, Michael Thad. 2002. The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps. Chapel Hill: UNC Press. • Anonymous. 2005. A Woman in Berlin. New York: Metropolitan Books. The posthumously published journal of a female journalist during the last days of the Third Reich and the first several weeks of the Russian occupation. • Bessel, Richard. 2009. Germany 1945. New York: HarperCollins. An outstanding account of the end of the Nazi regime and the beginning of reconstructing a new Germany. • Blatman, Daniel. 2011. The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi genocide. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. • Borowski, Tadeusz. 1976. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. New York: Penguin Books. • Browning, Christopher. 2001. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins. An insightful analysis of how the Order Police, with little indoctrination or training, became killers • Davidson, Eugene. 1966. The Trial of the Germans. New York: MacMillan. Davidson provides biographical sketches of each defendant and coverage of the post-war Nuremberg trials • De Pres, Terrence. 1976. The Survivor: Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Oxford University Press. The author is not himself a survivor, but he writes a compelling, graphic study • Dimsdale, Joel E. 2016. Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals. New Haven: Yale University Press. • Fest, Joachim. 2004. Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich. New York : Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. An strong narrative and analysis of the last ten days of the Nazi regime and the basis of the film, Downfall. • Frankl, Viktor E. 1963. Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. Boston: Beacon Press. A survivor's account of Auschwitz and the meaning of life. • Goldhagen, Daniel. 1996. Hitler’s Willing Executioner’s. New York: Knopf. A controversial rebuttal to Browning’s Ordinary Men. Goldensohn, Leon, and Robert Gellately. 2004. The Nuremberg Interviews. New York: Alfred Knopf. • Gross, Jan T. 2002. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. New York: Penguin Books. • Hamerow, Theodore. 2008. Why We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust. New York: W. W. Norton. Hamerow discusses the response of the US and Europe to reports of Nazi atrocities during the war. • Hildebrandt, Sabine. 2016. The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science During the Third Reich. New York: Berghahn. • Keneally, Thomas. 1993. Schindler's List. New York: Simon and Schuster. The Australian writer's account reads like a novel, but it is solidly factual; Steven Spielberg's movie is based on Keneally's book. • Kershaw, Ian. 2011. The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 19441945. New York: Penguin Press. • Kogon, Eugen. 1973. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them. New York: Octagon Books. This Austrian author, imprisoned before the war, survived Buchenwald and discusses and analyzes the whole system • Laqueur, Walter. 1990. The Terrible Secret: Suppression of Truth about Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Boston: Little, Brown. A well-documented account of the response of the outside world to the Holocaust. • Levi, Primo. 1988. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Summit Books. An Italian Jew's survival story • Levi, Primo. 1996. Survival at Auschwitz. New York: Simon and Schuster. • Lewy, Guenter. 2000. The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies. New York: Oxford University Press. One of the first studies of its kind; the Nazis murdered an estimated 200,000 Gypsies, most of whom lived in Eastern Europe • Lifton, Robert Jay. 1986. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. A psychologist's study of doctors who performed ghoulish medical experiments • Lipstadt, Deborah E. 1993. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: Free Press. • Lower, Wendy. 2013. Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. • Maier, Charles. 1988. The Unmasterable Past. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Well-written work on the burden of the Third Reich on German historical memory. • Nir, Yehuda. 2006. The Lost Childhood: A Memoir. Tucson, Ariz: Schaffner Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=434421. • Nyszli, Miklos. 1993. Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. New York: Arcade Press. The chilling story of a Hungarian Jew who was forced to work for the notorious "angel of death," Dr. Josef Mengele. • Poliakov, Leon. 1979. Harvest of Hate. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. An account of the ghettoization of European Jews. • Rajchman, Chil, and Solon Beinfeld. 2011. The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Survivor's Memory, 1942-1943. New York: Pegasus Books. • Rothchild, Sylvia. 1981. Voices from the Holocaust. New York: New American Library. A collection of oral histories of Holocaust survivors. • Shermer, Michael and Alex Grobman. 2000. Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? Berkeley: University of California. Authors study recent Holocaust deniers and refute their arguments Steiner, Jean-Francois. 1967. Treblinka. New York: Simon and Schuster. A fact-based, novel-like account of the second largest and second most lethal death camp (from which there was an escape), written by the son of French survivors • Taylor, Fred. 2011. Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Thacker, Toby. 2006. The End of the Third Reich: Defeat, Denazification & Nuremberg, January 1944-November 1946 (Stroud: Tempus. • Wiesel, Elie. 2004. Night. Dawn. The Accident. A Trilogy. New York: Hill and Wang. The graphic and deeply moving memoir by the Holocaust's most famous survivor, who is also a Nobel-Prize winner. • Yelton, David K. 2002. Hitler’s Volkssturm: The Nazi Militia and the fall of Germany. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
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