european Books

The best yet on this phase of the war...

... More extensive review to follow soon.

Ray Moseley does an excellent job in bringing to light the final days of Italy under Mussolini. The Republic of Salo which is formed after the Nazi's free Mussolini from prison is a vague attempt to showcase that Italian people are still in control in Italy. As Moseley shows the Republic had no real power and Mussolini was consulted on almost nothing leaving the German military to run the state. The book jumps around on many topics and discusses Mussolini's stances on a variety of issues from anti-semitism to law and order in the fascist decrees he issued during this republic. The final fall of Mussolini and his capture amongst the mountains of lake Como are very well done and then the final part focuses on various myths related to Mussolini. While the book bounces around it is a great contribution to the last 600 days (594 to be exact) of Mussolini's empire and the tragic fall of Italy's most powerful leader.

As I listen to the nightly news about our own Governments actions, I find it interesting to read about others. Ours certainly does a bunch of stupid stuff. But then you look at what others do and have to agree with Churchill that a democracy is the worst form of government except that all the other forms are worse.

In this book on the last 600 days of Mussolini, you get a very clear illustration of this point. In his last days, Mussolini was a tyrant, yet at the same time he was utterly miserable in the grip of anger, shame and depression. The German forces that had been supporting were being driven from Italy by the Americans and British.

Mussolini had had the power, as it was said, "he made the trains run on time." But in the end he had failed, and he knew he had failed. He had tried to run a country. And he made some tragic errors. We have so many books on Hitler, it is nice to see that finally we are beginning to see what happened in another aspect of WWII.

I was also amused to see the points of controversy that remain sixty years later. I guess that like the killing of Lincoln and Kennery, and events like Pearl Harbour and the World Trade Center, mysteries will always remain.

Greetings,
What a pleasure it has been to look into the eyes of a great writer. His thoughts on change and personal responsibility is mind blowing. I love the way he gives feedback on the life, writings and ideas of other writers from his time. Hesse's humble but yet confident.

A collection of some of Hermann Hesse`s best essays and articles. This is the evidence that he was one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century. Here he directly express some of his opinions on several subjects, ie literature and they all have a touch of his brilliancy of wisdom and narrative skills. A book that still deserves to be read!

Hesse writes as beautifully in his essays as he does in his non-fiction. What piqued my interest in the book was his essay on "Steppenwolf". It disappointed me, because it is barely a page and a half, a unsatisfactory synopsis of his most personal (I believe) book. When Hesse comes to mind I immediately think of "Steppenwolf" before the "Glass Bead Game", "Siddharta", or any of his other masterpieces. Like Hamsun's "Mysteries" or Ingmar Bergman's film "Hour of the Wolf", perhaps it was simply too "personal" for him to go into.
The rest of the essays, however, reflect a meditative, open, imaginative mind free of prejudice. I can't recall the exact name of the essay, but it has to do with bad poetry, and Hesse articulates a feeling that other lovers of poetry will immediately understand: that poems traditionally considered 'bad' often reflect our feelings in a less 'rhyme-scheme', formulaic way, and have a sort of tonic effect on the emotions. Hesse was truly a revolutionary.

A very interesting book, clear, sincere and devastating at the moment when it was written. An honest view of what the Bolshevik Russia was doing from the point of view of a disillusioned very famous anarquist who had seen Russia as the promised land where the "ideal revolution" was taking place. If you are interested in history, don't miss it.

The long awaited re-release of Emma Goldman's My Disillusionment in Russia was well worth the wait. This is simply a marvelous book.

This book continues the tradition of Bakunin (a contemporary of Marx) who argued that Marxism would lead to a state authoritarianism that would be just as exploitive and alienating as bourgeois capitalistic "democracies" if not more so. Goldman shows, as she would later argue in her essay "There is No Communism in Russia," that Marxist run economies and governments merely supplant the bourgeoisie as employer and coercive authority. They do not empower workers and communities to run their own affairs along free and cooperative socialistic lines.

Like many leftists during her time, Goldman initially supported the communist accession to power as preferable to the Tsarist regime. But her support was largely based on reports given by communists in the pay of the Bolsheviks. Goldman was deported from the USA because she spoke publicly against the draft. Although she probably would have won the case, she decided not appeal the deportation order because she wanted to lend her services to the Russian people and their revoution. It required little time for her to realize that Bolshevik claims for progress belied the reality in Russia. Everywhere she saw evidence of mass starvation, extreme censorship, political oppression, cronyism, mass imprisonments and executions, and the tacit contempt the Russian people had for the Bolsheviks. Her descriptions of Lenin should help to settle oft-repeated lie that Stalin was a Leninist aberration. He was the natural, if more efficient, successor of Lenin.

She deftly refutes the Marxian apologetic that only countries that have experienced extensive capitalistic development are best suited to enter into a revolutionary phase. If that is so, she asks, then why haven't England, Germany and the USA experienced the social revolution Marx predicted? She demonstrates that the Bolsheviks were more concerned with power than socialism and replaced the revolution with statism. The people, not the Bolsheviks, brought about the revolution in Russia, she argues. The Bolsheviks stole and then murdered it.

The narrative style of this work makes it riveting and real. Readers will get a good sense of the distinction between the libertarian socialism advocated by anarchism and the faux socialism advocated by Marxism. This is a great book.

Anyone interested in the history of radical politics would be well advised to read this book. Loathed by the American establishment Emma is deported to the young Soviet Russia for her opposition to forced conscription during the First World War. This book is a rare first-hand account of the new Soviet Russia in its earliest pre-Stalin years. Travelling around the new Russia, Emma describes many face-to-face meetings with many of the key figures of the revolution such as Zinoviev, Lenin, Trotsky, Kolontay and Kropotkin. Unfortunately for Emma her belief that a better world must be as much "anti-state" and "anti-monopoly" as "anti-capitalist" meant she finds herself as much at loggerheads with the Bolsheviks in Russia as she had previously been with the socialists in America. As the new Russia takes shape, Emma describes the "Frankenstein monster" she witnesses as a "defeat of the revolution". This is a diamond in the bargain bins.

Mary is taking you to the Stalin era... in imagination I lived her life while reading the book..When I went to Moscow it felt as if I have already been there.

A great account of how people lived in the Soviet Union during Stalin's rule. The advantage of this book is that it gives you the facts in such a way that it is up to you to decide whether or not the author is right in her conclusions. I strongly recommend this book for both academic and private reading for I believe it is one of the most unique books ever written about the lifes of regular Soviet citizens.

Although I have read a number of books on the Soviet Union, much to my surprise, I found myself totally absorbed by Mary Leder's odyssey. Starting with her travels across the US, and thence to Birobidzhan (Siberia), later asked to spy and, of course, spied upon, I believe Ms. Leder spins an eloquent and gripping tale. From Mary the dedicated communist to Mary the disenchanted one, from Mary the factory worker to Mary the editor-translator, she paints a totally honest and courageous picture of herself and her travails and those of so many of her fellow citizens. I recommend this book highly.

While Pasternak is known in the United States mainly for his novel "Dr. Zhivago" - or, more to the point, the film based on "Dr. Zhivago" - he was quite an accomplished poet. A better poet, I think, than he was a novelist. Although I've never read Mr. Rudman's translation - or, for that matter, any translation at all - "Sister of Mine-Life" keeps to its bosom a host of beautiful poems.

Rather than try to explain Pasternak's incredible gift for metaphor and detail, his absolute love of words - he was a decent translator of Shakespeare and others - I'll roughly approximate my favorite poem, from it's original Russian. It is untitled.

***

My friend, you ask, who ordered
That the holy idiot's speech should blaze?

***

Let us trickle words
As the garden drips amber and lemon
Absently and generous,
Gently, gently, gently.

And there's no need to explain
Why there is such ceremony
Of madder and of lemon
Scattering on leaves.

Who made pine needles rush
On a long stick, like music
Through the locks of Venetian blinds,
To the bookcase.

Who reddened the rug of mountain ash
Rippling beyond the door,
Written through with beautiful,
Quivering cursives.

You ask, who orders
That August be great
To whom nothing is small
Who lives in the finishing

Of maple leaves;
Who, since the days of the Ecclesiastes,
Hasn't left his post
And is hewing alabaster?

You ask, who orders,
That the September lips of asters and dahlias
Shall suffer?
That leaves
Should fall from stone caryatids
To the damp gravestones
Of autumn hospitals?

You ask, who orders?
--Omnipotent God of details,
Omnipotent God of love,
Of Yaigails and Yaidvigas.

I don't know, was it decided,
The riddle of the road to the afterlife,
But life, like the stillness
Of autumn -- is details.

I can't quite transmit the pine needles rushing through the Venetian blinds as boats through a sluice, but I'm sure Mr. Rudman could. Even through my approximate translation, it's possible to see what a man of detail Pasternak was. In my edition, the introduction begins: "With Pasternak, you must hurt" -- as great ideas are, the editor notes, painful.

Pasternak certainly took painful care of his words, his thoughts, his beauty. And "Sister of Mine-Life," one of his earlier collections - (the summer of 1917) - is beautiful, detailed and pained.

***

As a post script, I prefer "Sister of Mine-Life," to "My Sister-Life" because the construction "sistra maya" - rather than "maya sistra" stresses that she's my sister.

Also, because life and sister are both female in gender, "my sister" and "my life" are dually coupled in Pasternak's title. "My" could refer solely to sister, or it could be my life, as well.

Some of our strongest poets are those who energize the material things and concrete sensations of daily life in special ways. Objects set apart by poetic imagination and power become sacred and establish a bond between the reader as perceiver and the thing perceived. By extension the bond opens the reader to an entire universe of ensouled matter--a new way of looking at the world.

Such is the poetry of Boris Pasternak in this 1917 book written at the height of The Great War and on the eve of the October Revolution. Pasternak's spirited materialism predates William Carlos Williams's concept "No ideas but in things."

Pasternak sets many of these poems in concretely described locations where his magical materialism can go to work. In "The Flies of the Moochkap Teahouse,"

The spirit sweats--the horizon's
tobacco-tinged--like thought
Windmills image a fishing village
Boats and weathered nets.

This poet's world view of ensouled materiality provides a unique perspective on the new century just beginning. Each reader must decide for him or herself just how prescient or prophetic Pasternak's "The Definition of Soul" was to become.

It falls like a ripe pear into the storm
with a single clinging leaf
How faithful--it quits its branch--
reckless--it chokes in the heat.

We learn much about Pasternak from his later novel and the film (Dr. Zhivago) it spawned--but we don't experience his power as a poet. He was possibly the the most poetically powerful of figures in what is known as the Silver Age of Russian Literature, including Marina Tsvetaeva Selected Poems (Tsvetaeva, Marina) (Twentieth-Century Classics), Osip Mandelstam Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (New York Review Books Classics), Anna Akhmatova Anna Akhmatova (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets), and Nikolai Gumilyov The Pillar of Fire, among the most talented and brilliant poets of the twentieth century. They bore the brunt of the Soviet regime's ideological attacks and physical repression.

Here is poetic brilliance and talent of the first rank--the power of poetry of material things on display.

Pasternak's poetry is better than his prose. Why he is still often better known for the latter baffles me. I suggest this or any of his collected poems to the reader looking for creative, quality poetry. Pasternak certainly ranks as one of the greatest amongst the group of very talented Russian poets that emerged during the first quarter of the 20th centuary. His poems deserve just as much (if not more) recognition as his novels.

A fine book; little (or nothing) that is not already known; but it does a very good job of assembling together relevant events and interpretation which effectively disproves the myth of American beneficence and unselfishness in its policies leading up to, during, and just after World War II.

I bought this book before I went on a battlefield tour across France, Belgium, and Holland with Jacques and 27 people from southern Ontario. His book is a real eye opener for those who are interested in the politcal aspects of the Second World War. So much has been hidden over the years about the role US corporations played in this conflict. Some of it I was aware of. Some of it I wasn't. This book is very much worth buying and reading. Some parts really shocked me as I grew up seeing this event as "The Good War". I had some moments during the tour to discuss this book with Jacques. He's a really great guy with a fun personality and knows his history. He's really done the research. Check his book out. You won't be disappointed.

This book does a good job of bringing to the surface and exposing plainly that which even a novice on WWII history already knows about the role of Americas corporate giants in driving American policy before, during and after the war.

It is well written and will give the novice buff a new perspective on the war - though it is easy to fall into the Anti-American trap that the title of this book projects, the author does a reasonably good job of presenting himself as more than a typical Chomsky-worshipping leftist revisionist. Praise to the author for his insightful work.

The third in the author's trilogy on the 1813 campaign. He covers the entire period from September to December 1813, and in addition to Leipzig itself, he covers the battles leading up to it in Sept. and early Oct, the French retreat after the battle, the sieges of the fortresses incl Danzig, Glogau, Dresden, Magdeburg and numerous others, plus coverage of the Danes in December. Leipzig dashed the dreams of a French Empire when the armies of Prussia, Russia, Austria, and Sweden converged on Napoleon and his Grande Armee. It was the greatest battle of the Napoleonic Wars, so decisive it would be called "the Battle of Nations." Smaller countries like Poland and Saxony seemed to be submerged in the titanic struggle, and the battle shaped Europe for more than a century. Napoleon at Leipzig not only covers this pivotal battle, but also the maneuvers that led up to it and the retreat that followed. At Hanau, the Bavarians learned to their dismay that Napoleon was still the master of the battlefield. The book includes the campaigns of Marshal Davout in the north, and the fate of the besieged French fortresses. From glittering field marshals to ragged Cossacks, in massive battles or small skirmishes, we see the dramatic campaign unfold. George Nafziger s intensive research into the 1813 campaign shows how the finest general of all time was bought to bay. The greatest battle of the Napoleonic Wars, and the campaign that led up to it, is thoroughly studied for the first time in English in Napoleon at Leipzig
1996, hard bound in dust jacket, 7 1/2, x 10 1/2, 384 pages, numerous illus, maps, orders of battle, notes, index.

Leipzig is the greatest and biggest battle of all Napoelonic battles ever fought. This is a shame that only G. Nafziger wrote book about this epic battle. I like this book. The maps are fine, and the descriptions of the battles, including the Battle of Leipzig, are interesting. But this book is rather for Americans and Europeans, not for the British. They are interested only in Waterloo, and Peter Hofschroer. This book is also a big stuff for all wargamers.

This is part of a 3 part series on the 1813 Campaign...Mr. Nafziger has given us a detailed and well researched account of the campaign. This thoughtful book gives the best recent account of Leipzig available in English. It is unfortunate that this decisive campaign is not the subject of more books.

For those of you unfamiliar with George Nafziger's work he is meticulous in his research and detail...if he tells you a regiment is located in a certain place at a particular time you can pretty much take it to the bank. Unlike a lot of authors, Mr. Nafziger does the research and allows the facts to dictate the direction of the book...Having no axes to grind means that the information being presented will also be more balanced than you find in a lot of books as well.

Generally when I see a book by George Nafziger in the time period that I don't own; I get it...

Michael La Vean
Fellow, International Napoleonic Society

A very instructive and interesting book about eastern Europe, being the author's existencial autobiography. The book gives important informations about less known issues, like Oskar Milosz poetry. Not to be missed by anyone who likes Czeslaw Milosz's work.

The test of a truly great book is when you long NOT to finish it. A hundred pages to the end, then fifty, and you slow your tempo down to a page-a-day, then a paragraph, and then finally, just a couple of sentences as to prolong the pain, the pleasure. Milosz's autobiography par excellence, Native Realm, is one such book. And much more than that. A modern Odyssey, it traces the tempestous voyages of one of this century's greatest poets, one of Europa's finest sons.

Subtitled 'A Search for Self-Definition,' Native Realm unfolds as a diary of one who lived through some of the twentieth century's bleakest moments, two world wars, the complete destruction of a city (Warsaw) and the near-complete extermination of a people (Poland's Jews). Milosz takes us step by step down into the inferno of his century, into the quagmire of his homeland. A sorrowful Virgil, Milosz guides us through each cavern of a very personal hell. Born in one of Europe's most forgotten and mystical corners, Lithuania, Milosz recounts the recipe of his own European-ness, a Lithuanian mother and a Polish father of Sorbian descent. His family was of one petty gentry and thus, young Milosz's youth was a cloudless one of innocent expeditions into the dense Baltic forests of pine and spruce. Milosz reminisces with a slight tinge of nostalgia, painting pictures of an Eden-like world where man and surroundings were linked in a symbosis of mutual respect and awe. Milosz's homeland was a ethnically heterogenous one where Lithuanian, Pole, Byelorussian and Jew lived in an amicable tension, each bringing precious ingredients to their common feast. The kitchen of this feast was the city that more than any other left its brand on Milosz's psyche: Wilno, known today as Vilnius, capital of the Lithuanian republic. Here, Milosz revels in his reveries through narrow cobble-stoned streets and over an equally bumpy Catholic education which also left its mark on the man. Conflicted with his deep love for Creation, Milosz never gave up his faith in and awe of the Creator. Smithing his own highly individualistic faith, Milosz remained skeptical of the new creed of salvation that spread the good news to depression-racked Europe: Communism.

One of this book's richest chapters focuses on Marxism and Milosz's cautious rejection of its monolithic message, and another one picks apart the nation that carried this evangel to its furthest extreme, Russia. Milosz analyzes Russia and her people much like Dostoevsky did with Poland and the Poles in House of the Dead, with a grudging respect and a candid admission of distaste. Pole and Rus, brothers who are separated by a spiritual fence and only too happy to stay on their perspective sides. Milosz embraces his Polish, Roman roots and draws a marked line in the sand between him and the Byzantine east. Yet, Milosz remains fair and does his best to present the all sides of the Russian bear, from the red-bearded, vodka-breathed soldier in the Tsarist army who befriended young Milosz to the 'kind-hearted' Red Army Ivans who shot their German captive so as to save him from the cruelties of a Russian winter.

The most gripping part of Milosz's story is his description of life in hell, that is of surviving the Sodom and Gomorrah of Nazi-occupied Poland. Milosz squeaked out an minimalist existence in the nightmare of Hans Frank's General Gouvernment, the Nazi-controlled part of Poland. Amidst the starvation and daily executions, Milosz kept his sanity and humanity intact by etching out his poems, all the while painfully aware that things were a whole lot worse over the ghetto wall. Milosz never tries to escape his culpability in not doing more. He remarks, 'To live with one's cowardice is bitter.' Bitter indeed, but the reader feels the hopelessness of the situation and asks himself/herself, 'Would we have done any different?' Milosz lets us stare at the answer.

Native Realm's secret not only lies in its almost hyponotic ability to sweep the reader along the tumultous waves of 20th century Eastern Europe, but most of all, in its captain's steerage. Milosz's prose beams with the simple elegance of his poems. Every word solid and right in its place. Every sentence either rings with near-Homeric concreteness---hiding in Warsaw's sewers during the Uprising, " The women closed the metal cover over us, and inside we immediately began to suffocate. It was quite theoretical: in the light from the electrical bulb I saw the mouths of fish thrown up on the sand and heads withering on stems of necks," or with aphoristic sting, "Westerners like to dwell in the empyrean of noble words about spirit and freedom, but it is not often that they ask someone whether he has enough money for lunch."

Such gems lie like amber on a beach. You reach one and you just want to sit, admire, examine and give blessings for the happiness burning in your hand. But all good things must come to an end, as does Milosz's eloquent tale of self-discovery. After the cauldron simmered down, Milosz escaped to America and found a fresh, new world where opportunity lay for the taking and nature smiled with the purity of Paradise. But his sojourn remained a tentative one as Europa beckoned constantly. Eventually, Milosz succumbed to his homesickness. "Europe herself gathered me in her warm embrace...Europe, after all, was home to me."

A fitting end to this eloquent dissection of what it means to be European, to 'become' European. Czeslaw Milosz has finally reached home, to that pantheon filled with those rare few who have succeeded in over-coming self, sect, and narrow nationhood to be worthy of the title, 'European.' Montaigne and Goethe, welcome home your brother to his rightful native realm.

If you want to better understand Europe and European history of the 20th century, this is a book to read. Milosz is a Nobel prize-winning poet and writer. This book is his autobiography. He was born in 1911 on the territory of the former Russian Empire. He comes from the Polish-Lithuanian family and is an ultimate Eastern European. He also knows America and Western Europe well.

His knowledge of the European history of the 20th century is nor from the books, but something he lived through himself. Milosz traveled to Siberia with his father. He survived both World wars. He studied in France before WW2 and spent the war in Warsaw, where he witnessed destruction of Warsaw after the upraising. Milosz seems very observant, honest, and has a tendency to self-reflection, which makes the narrative even more interesting.

He had many dangerous adventures during the war years and he remembers and describes them in great detail. Many of his remarks about Russia are right on target (as Russian I can confirm that). This is great and unique book of the ultimate Eastern European. Definitely worth reading if you are interested in the history of this part of the world.

This is a masterwork by Dr. Wilhelmina Feemster Jashemski and Frederick G. Meyer that looks at the Roman cities destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 AD from the perspective of the Bay of Naples area's natural environment of the time. The many color plates in this large work also portray the artwork that was preserved in hundreds of houses and public buildings in Pompeii and Herculaneum. But the real focus of the book is the landscape, gardens, and fauna that existed in the Roman period. Millions of natural, as well as man-made, objects were preserved in the molten ash that fell on those towns and the authors have provided hundreds of illustrations of these items which add up to a comprehensive look at Pompeii's everyday surroundings--street, garden and rural hinterland. It's an amazing work the will be of interest to anyone who is a student of Roman history, architecture, botany or horticulture.

Dr. Jashemski is a professor emeritus of the University of Maryland which is currently involved in the excavation of the last town major town still completely covered by Vesuvian ash--Stabiiae. The potential to find some spectacular artworks on that site is considerable as it was the most upscale neighborhood on the Bay of Naples in that period.

Jashemski has worked for many years in Pompeii's gardens - and produced many publications. This volume not only brings together a summary of all of her work, it is complemented by robust ancilliary studies from experts in paleosols, pollen and fauna. Beautiful pictures, well-referenced - an academic book that also is of interest to other readers. THE must have of all Pompeii publications in recent times.

Partly art history, partly botany and zoology, and partly forensics, THE NATURAL HISTORY OF POMPEII is a beautiful comprehensive work including the writings of archeologists and others who have examined the ruins at Pompeii and Herculaneum with the goal of establishing the nature of daily life as lived by the inhabitants of the two doomed settlements. This collection of scholarly papers was assembled into a fine book edited by W.F. Jashemski and Frederick Meyer. Jashemski is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she pioneered the field of ancient Roman garden archeology, and a former senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in DC which houses a wonderful collection of Pre-Columbian Art as well as stunningly landscaped grounds. Dr. Meyer is the former Supervisory Botanist in charge of the Herbarium at the National Arboretum also in Washington DC.

Selected chapters from the book cover a description of the site before the eruption in A.D. 79 based on the archeological, literary and Epigraphical Evidence. We know some of what we know about the fateful day owing to correspondence between Tacitus and Pliny the Younger, whose uncle Pliny the Elder perished in the catastrophe. Other chapters cover the flora and fauna of the area (both Pompeii and Herculaneum were affected). Archeologists have determined the identity of extensive numbers of plants (including trees, vines, edible foodstuffs and culinary and medicinal herbs), mammals, amphibians and reptiles, birds (grey parrots and love birds were kept as pets).

The book is filled with drawings and illustrations, as well as photographs of human and other animal, and plant remains; frescos from the villas and public buildings; jewelry and household items; and site shots including photos of the area surrounding the forum in Pompeii (including those taken from a balloon - with buildings clearly marked), as well as pictures of the archeologists at work capturing and preserving the natural material uncovered at the two sites.

If you are about to embark on a trip to Pompeii, have an interest in Roman life as it was lived in the first century, or an interest in archeological forensics, you will find this book enlightening, but perhaps it is more suitable for the Art History or Classics section of a school library than a coffee table book as one of my colleagues suggested.

Ok, I must warn you I'm a bit biased - I've had a class with Dr. G. As in class and this book, her knowledge of Weimar and Nazi Germany is amazing. This book has been well-researched with her many trips to Germany and she fluently speaks German - no need to have anyone else translate the documents and interpret for her. She's a great professor, a great author, and a great historian. I recommend this book because it not only covers fashion, but goes into the Nazi system, its hypocrisy, and the devastation on the homefront and in the concentration camps through the lens of fashion. And it is written so EVERYONE can understand and get something out of it! A must-read for anyone interested in Nazi Germany, women's history, and/or fashion!!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the period and/or in fashion. Loved the anecdotes! Fascinating from front to back. The pictures made the book even more enjoyable.

Can't wait to see what else Ms. Guenther writes!

For an unusual and insightful look into the Third Reich, I highly recommend this book. The title is a bit of a pun, as the subject material covers the Nazis' unfashionable attempts to maniplate control over female fashions and women's roles through the use of propaganda and manipulation of the fashion industry. The book is well researched, well written, and discloses new findings exposing the purging of Jews from the German fashion industry. The book also details information on the little known German Fashion Institute and the very fashion-conscious Nazi officials' wives and their hypocritical husbands. The book accurately portrays the parody of Nazi political folly, as well as the realism of the devastated German home front through the lives of German women during WWII and the millions of women in the concentration camps throughout Europe. Be forewarned - this is one of those books that once you pick it up, you won't want to put it down until you reach the last page.