Take a photo of a barcode or cover
amyeewing 's review for:
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
by William L. Shirer
I started out reading this as an ebook and was amazed by how slowly it went. Part of my problem was trying to pronounce all of the German names in the book without having any German language background. I switched about 20% of the way through to the audiobook version and started clipping along. Really love the job done by Grover Gardner.
I pretty quickly determined that you have to keep in mind that this book is a product of its time with all of William Shirer's personal prejudices built in. I'm used to histories being written by historians and all of the efforts that they put into it trying to remove their biases as much as possible. Of course, one cannot completely remove biases. It's simply not possible as a human. Shirer's personal views really shown strongly throughout the book, but I actually liked this as it made all of the biases much easier to pick out and consider. His interpretations and conjectures were clearly his own and not obfuscated as historical truths (to me at least). I think I'll generally stick to histories as authored by historians, but there was certainly a fair amount of value here when also considering how much of Shirer's thoughts can be considered as a primary source.
I pretty quickly determined that you have to keep in mind that this book is a product of its time with all of William Shirer's personal prejudices built in. I'm used to histories being written by historians and all of the efforts that they put into it trying to remove their biases as much as possible. Of course, one cannot completely remove biases. It's simply not possible as a human. Shirer's personal views really shown strongly throughout the book, but I actually liked this as it made all of the biases much easier to pick out and consider. His interpretations and conjectures were clearly his own and not obfuscated as historical truths (to me at least). I think I'll generally stick to histories as authored by historians, but there was certainly a fair amount of value here when also considering how much of Shirer's thoughts can be considered as a primary source.