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A review by lewoollett
The Lost Life of Eva Braun by Angela Lambert
4.0
This is the fourth book I've read about Eva Braun this year (yes, I'm a bit obsessed!) and by far the best. At 600 pages, it's pretty comprehensive but rarely feels like it's been padded out (in contrast, Heike B. Gortemaker's 300-page-long 'Eva Braun: Life with Hitler' seemed to be about 50% padding). It was also well-written, with a feminine touch that made it easy to picture the details of EB's life and feel sympathy for her. While I can't attest to its absolute historical accuracy, 'The Lost Life of Eva Braun' was probably more well-researched than Nerin Gunn's book about EB and definitely more so than Thomas Lundmark's (I swear that guy was just making things up). It also has footnotes to show where information is coming from, which means you don't have to flip back and forth constantly. There are lots of photos (some of which I hadn't seen before), which are fun to look at and interestingly captioned. Really, if you're only going to read one book about EB (and how many people out there are reading more than one?), this is definitely your best bet.
I do have a couple of criticisms, however. The first one is about Lambert's attempts to weave her German mother's life story in with EB's, which a few reviewers have already commented on. While these sections weren't boring or badly written, they also weren't that relevant to EB, so I ended up skipping most of them (it is a 600-page book, after all). The second last chapter was also kind of weird toward the end, becoming quasi-fictional as Lambert speculated on EB's final impressions before her suicide. Though these passages were quite nice to read, I don't know if they belonged in a nonfiction book, and their tone jarred a bit with everything that came before.
Anyway...Eva Braun. Angela Lambert. I liked it.
I do have a couple of criticisms, however. The first one is about Lambert's attempts to weave her German mother's life story in with EB's, which a few reviewers have already commented on. While these sections weren't boring or badly written, they also weren't that relevant to EB, so I ended up skipping most of them (it is a 600-page book, after all). The second last chapter was also kind of weird toward the end, becoming quasi-fictional as Lambert speculated on EB's final impressions before her suicide. Though these passages were quite nice to read, I don't know if they belonged in a nonfiction book, and their tone jarred a bit with everything that came before.
Anyway...Eva Braun. Angela Lambert. I liked it.