by Benjamin Carter Hett (2014)
In February 1933, Adolf Hitler had only a tenuous grasp on power. Chancellor of Germany for merely four weeks, he led a fragile coalition government. The Nazis had lost seats in the Reichstag in the recent election, and claimed only three of thirteen cabinet posts. Then on February 27th, arson sent the Reichstag, the home and symbol of German democracy, up in flames. Immediately blaming the Communists, Hitler's new government approved a decree that tore the heart out of the democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic and cancelled the rule of law. Five thousand people were immediately arrested. The Reichstag fire marked the true beginning of the Third Reich, which ruled for 12 more years. The controversy surrounding the fire's origins has endured for 80. In Burning the Reichstag, Benjamin Hett offers a gripping account of Hitler's rise to dictatorship-one that challenges orthodoxy and recovers the true significance of the part the fire played. At the scene the police arrested 23-year-old Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist stonemason. Though he was initially dismissed abroad as a Nazi tool, post-war historians since the 1950s have largely judged him solely guilty-a lone arsonist exploited by Hitler. Hett's book reopens the case, providing vivid portraits of key figures, including Rudolf Diels, Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, and the historian Fritz Tobias, whose account of the fire has, until now, been the standard. Making use of a number of new sources and archives, Hett sets the Reichstag fire in a wider context, revealing how and why it has remained one of the last mysteries of the Nazi period, and one of the most controversial and contested events in the 20th century. --Amazon.com.
Paul Preston
*The Spanish Civil War* vividly reconstructs in words and pictures —many never before seen outside Spain— the struggles of the war as well as discussing the wide implications of the revolution in the Republican zone, the emergence of a brutal dictatorship on the nationalist side and the extent to which the Spanish war was a dress rehearsal for the Second World War to come.
Christopher S. Celenza
“Machiavellian”—used to describe the ruthless cunning of the power-obsessed and the pitiless—is never meant as a compliment. But the man whose<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"> name became shorthand for all that is ugly in politics was more engaging and nuanced than his reputation suggests. Christopher S. Celenza’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Machiavelli: A Portrait removes the varnish of centuries to reveal not only the hardnosed political philosopher but the skilled diplomat, learned commentator on ancient history, comic playwright, tireless letter writer, and thwarted lover. Machiavelli’s hometown was the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century, a place of unparalleled artistic and intellectual attainments. But Florence was also riven by extraordinary violence. War and public executions were commonplace—Machiavelli himself was imprisoned and brutally tortured at the behest of his own government. These experiences left a deep impression on this keen observer of power politics, whose two masterpieces—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Prince and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Discourses—draw everywhere on the hard-won wisdom gained from navigating a treacherous world. But like many of Machiavelli’s fellow Florentines, he also immersed himself in the Latin language and wisdom of authors from the classical past. And for all of Machiavelli’s indifference to religion, vestiges of Christianity remained in his thought, especially the hope for a redeemer—a prince who would provide the stability so rare in Machiavelli’s worldly experience.
John R. Bradley
"When popular revolutions erupted in Tunisia and Egypt, Western pundits were quick to hail the stirrings of an Arab Spring and draw parallels between the resulting upheaval in the Middle East and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In The Tunisian Tsunami John R. Bradley offers a sober counternarrative to this outlook. It is not liberalism, democracy, and pluralism that will emerge triumphant, he argues, but instead radical Islam. Bradley illustrates how, in a region awash with extremist Wahhabi ideology, intertribal rivalries, and Sunni-Shia divisions, the idea that liberal and progressive trends will prevail is little more than wishful thinking"--
Stasys Knezys and Romanas Sedlickas
"In this carefully researched and extensively documented study, Stasys Knezys and Romanas Sedlickas examine the Chechen war from a military viewpoint. As they evenhandedly depict the strengths and weaknesses of both the Russians and Chechens, the authors consider how and why Russia, with one of the world's largest armies, failed to subdue the Chechens, and how the Chechens fought among themselves, yet also fought off the Russian Goliath.". "Military analysts and historians, political scientists, and Eastern European scholars will find The War in Chechnya an illuminating analysis of the military operations there and a valuable source of information for further studies."--BOOK JACKET.