A review by dsamorodnitsky
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer

5.0

A flawed book. It's dated -- at one point Shirer equates homosexuals and murderers, and later on makes a tasteless joke at the expense of the Japanese. At least one of the stories told here -- Heydrich's assassination stuck out in my mind, though I'm sure there are more -- is vague and not quite accurate, but I'm willing to chalk that up to information being available today that wasn't when Rise and Fall was published. The subtitle is misleading since this is emphatically a work of journalism, not history. Also for some reason my copy was filled with typos.

For all my complaining, though, its reputation is well deserved. It's an excellent overview of a million stories that themselves deserve book-length tellings. The tagline on the back is "The book that shook the conscience of the world!" Yeah.