![]() ![]() ![]() I just wish he'd done more of that, and spent less time on the details of Blum's cigarettes, Churchill's dinners, or the endless (and hilarious) follies of prominent Nazis.Īs a side note, this somewhat ADD-style of piling up anecdotes also makes the writing less wonderful than it could have been. He's obviously capable of explaining the whys of history, as the final chapter on the Nazi-Soviet pact makes clear. via detail of the clothes people wore, the food they ate, the cigarettes they smoked." All of which is great if you want a 'feeling for the period', but pretty dismal and dull if you want to know *why* something happened. This is seemingly by design- "this tome," Brendon says, "is a parcel of epitomies," he claims to "accumulate personal minutiae" and conjures up "the contemporary experience. ![]() The vast majority of it reads like the work of an immensely talented autodidact historian who has completely lost his ability to follow a thought through an entire paragraph. But don't come to this book expecting explanation. Given that though, he did a great job of laying out the facts. Brendon tried to the impossible with this book- there's just no way anyone can squeeze a decade as crazy as the thirties into one book. ![]()
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