They need to get rid of these fucking things. I'm sick of waiting six months after a book comes out before I can buy it. I went to B+N to get the third installment in Richard Evans' series on Nazi Germany (which is by far the best way to learn about the Nazis, btw, and blows away everything else I've read on the subject) and it's 40 bucks! Bah. Greedy fucking publishers.

My criteria for picking up a HC:

a) I've read it before and it's really, really good
b) It's on sale in the publisher's overstock section of the bookstore

or

c) Same as B only at a used bookstore in very good condition.

The last HC I bought was DeLillo's Underworld. It was $9.99.

bart, have you read Ian Kershaw's books on Hitler? If so, how do Evans' books compare?

I'm a big fan of Kershaw's Hitler books (especially Nemesis). The most obvious difference between his and Evans' books is that Kershaw usually writes specifically about Hitler, while Evans is writing about Germany in general throughout the time of the Nazis. He covers the same general period of time that Gordon Craig's Germany 1866-1945 did (although obviously with much more emphasis on the interwar period and WWII), but while Craig crammed everything into a single volume and mainly stuck with political machinations and military stuff, Evans covers nearly all aspects of German society. Each book is six or seven hundred pages, but from the amount of info in them you'd think they'd be twice as long.

26.40 at amazon, but still...


it's been years since i last bought a new hcover book. they're expensive as fuck. the more books you read/buy, the more money conscious you become i guess. back when i read a book per month, i didn't pay as much attention. now, it's like an obsession. i've been looking up used bookstores all over town and taking notes regarding the ones that have the stuff that most appeals to me.

hey bart, is this one as good as everyone says it is? it's been on my list for a while, but haven't gotten around to getting it yet

authors need money bart

It's very outdated at this point. It was the standard work on the Nazis for a while (although the guy who wrote it was a reporter and not an historian, which makes a big difference), but it reflects the standard position of post Marshall Plan America that the German people had been "the first victims of Hitler" and that the Nazis had really never enjoyed popular support. That they ruled solely through terror, etc. Our government had to push this view on people if it was going to get us to agree to the massive waves of aid going to the Germans. Nowadays historians have pretty much completely discarded that viewpoint. (There are some people, like the guy who wrote Hitler's Willing Exececutioners, who take the polar opposite view, that German society had evolved in a way that naturally led aggression and genocide, and that we had to completely destroy it in order to rebuild it as a well-behaved democracy. That view is just as wrong as Shirer's.)

Anyway, if you have the choice, I would go with Evans or another recent author. It's not that Shirer's book isn't a really great (though very long) read, but it just isn't accurate.

Bah. They make more than enough on paperback rights as it is.

Paperbacks are more fun to read anyways.

thanks for the input man, sure appreciate it.

i'll probably go with the evans books then.

Most author's earnings are far more indie band than Aerosmith.

Again, I say to you: bah.

Hey Bart, Amazon has the hardcover one for 26 bucks.

http://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-at-Wa ... 379&sr=1-1

Yeah, I'm going to go back and check whether B+N was selling it for $40 after all. That was the msrp and I didn't see any other price on it, but it was on a table with a bunch of other hardcovers so maybe they were all on sale or something.