Christina's bookshelf: currently-reading en-US Mon, 10 Mar 2025 15:46:27 -0700 60 Christina's bookshelf: currently-reading 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich]]> 202101990 Through a connected set of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated out from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime’s leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question, how does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil?Richard Evans, author of the acclaimed The Third Reich Trilogy and over two dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Germany. Having spent half a century searching for the truths behind one of the most horrifying episodes in human history, in Hitler’s People, he brings us back to the original site of the Nazi namely, the lives of its most important members.Working in concentric circles out from Hitler and his closest allies, Evans forms a typological framework of Germany society under Nazi rule from the top down. With a novelist’s eye for detail, Evans explains the Third Reich through the personal failings and professional ambitions of its members, from its most notorious deputies—like Goebbels, the regime’s propagandist, and Himmler, the Holocaust’s chief architect—to the crucial enforcers and instruments of the Nazi agenda that history has largely forgotten—like the schoolteacher Julius Streicher and the actress Leni Riefenstahl. Drawing on a wealth of recently unearthed historical sources, Hitler’s People lays bare the inner and outer lives of the characters whose choices led to the deaths of millions.Nearly a century after Hitler’s rise, the leading nations of the West are once again being torn apart by a will to power. By telling the stories of these infamous lives as human lives, Evans asks us to grapple with the complicated nature of complicity, showing us that the distinctions between individual and collective responsibility—and even between pathological evil and rational choice—are never easily drawn.]]> 624 Richard J. Evans 0593296427 Christina 0 currently-reading 4.10 2024 Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich
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]]> <![CDATA[The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany]]> 767171 No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich. When the bitter war was over, and before the Nazis could destroy their files, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender produced an almost hour-by-hour record of the nightmare empire built by Adolph Hitler. This record included the testimony of Nazi leaders and of concentration camp inmates, the diaries of officials, transcripts of secret conferences, army orders, private letters—all the vast paperwork behind Hitler's drive to conquer the world.

The famed foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, spent five and a half years sifting through this massive documentation. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind.

This worldwide bestseller has been acclaimed as the definitive book on Nazi Germany; it is a classic work.

The accounts of how the United States got involved and how Hitler used Mussolini and Japan are astonishing, and the coverage of the war-from Germany's early successes to her eventual defeat-is must reading

]]> 1147 William L. Shirer 0671728687 Christina 0 currently-reading 4.20 1960 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
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]]> <![CDATA[The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America]]> 32191706 de facto segregation—that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.

As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book� (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.]]> 368 Richard Rothstein 1631492853 Christina 0 currently-reading 4.44 2017 The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
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