First question:
What is Mill's overall thesis in Chapter II of On Liberty?
Second:
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:
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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
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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:
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Allen, Michael Thad. 2002. The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the
Concentration Camps. Chapel Hill: UNC Press.
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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.
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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.
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Blatman, Daniel. 2011. The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi genocide.
Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
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Borowski, Tadeusz. 1976. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. New York:
Penguin Books.
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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
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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
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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
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Dimsdale, Joel E. 2016. Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Gross, Jan T. 2002. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne,
Poland. New York: Penguin Books.
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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.
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Hildebrandt, Sabine. 2016. The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and
Anatomical Science During the Third Reich. New York: Berghahn.
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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.
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Kershaw, Ian. 2011. The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 19441945. New York: Penguin Press.
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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
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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.
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Levi, Primo. 1988. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Summit Books. An Italian
Jew's survival story
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Levi, Primo. 1996. Survival at Auschwitz. New York: Simon and Schuster.
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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
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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
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Lipstadt, Deborah E. 1993. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory. New York: Free Press.
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Lower, Wendy. 2013. Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Boston
: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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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.
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Nir, Yehuda. 2006. The Lost Childhood: A Memoir. Tucson, Ariz: Schaffner Press.
http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=434421.
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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.
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Poliakov, Leon. 1979. Harvest of Hate. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. An account of
the ghettoization of European Jews.
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Rajchman, Chil, and Solon Beinfeld. 2011. The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Survivor's
Memory, 1942-1943. New York: Pegasus Books.
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Rothchild, Sylvia. 1981. Voices from the Holocaust. New York: New American Library.
A collection of oral histories of Holocaust survivors.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Yelton, David K. 2002. Hitler’s Volkssturm: The Nazi Militia and the fall of
Germany. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
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