Ebook: Hitler: A Biography

Overview: Kershaw’s two-volume biography Hitler, subtitled 1889–1936: Hubris (1999) and 1936–1945: Nemesis (2000), ranks among the most significant of its kind; only biographies by Joachim Fest and Alan Bullock are in Kershaw’s league. For this abridgment of his opus, Kershaw stripped out its scholarly apparatus, reduced verbatim quotations from primary sources, and added an essay of reflections on his approach to the study of his infamous subject. With these changes, the abridgment retains two themes of Kershaw’s full-scale original: analyzing the political support the demagogue mustered from the populace and key institutional centers of Germany on his ascent to and exercise of power; and the decisive personal role of Hitler in instigating World War II and genocide. The narrative Kershaw constructs on this foundation is a superb organization and expression of Hitler’s chronological arc that plummeted the world into catastrophe and moral trauma, a trajectory informed by Kershaw’s attention to rationalizations by which people in and outside Germany, whether leaders or led, buried doubts about Hitler until his power was unrestrained, impossible to stop but by war or assassination. Manifestly, Kershaw constitutes core-collection material. —Gilbert Taylor, Booklist