Quite interesting but he tends to ramble a little. A lot of views presented from different historians and biographers of Hitler. I have less respect for John Toland now, and David Irving made up a lot of stuff out of his imagination ! Hitler was not a demon, but he sure was a hate-filled sort of genius that the Germans just loved at the time. ( )

Refers to Irving and Toland far too much to be considered seriously. ( )

Lukacs is an opinionated cuss, and doesn't care if you think so. This book about Hitler is good, this is bad; that historian is horrible, that historian is intelligent. Etc. This, Lukacs makes clear, is NOT a biography of Hitler, but a historiography of biographies of Hitler and other secondary sources on Hitler, Hitlerism, and Nazi Germany. Though he sometime talks of the minutiae of the sources for Hitler's biography, he mostly talks about major themes in Hitler's life and Hitler's place in the wider context of the telling of history. So, for instance, there are chapters on when did he become a convinced anti-Semite (ch. 2), was he a reactionary or a revolutionary (ch. 3), was the Third Reich an anomaly in German history or a culmination of German history (ch. 7), etc. The writing is sometimes hard and the reasoning sometimes dense, but it is well worth the effort if you've read enough about World War II, the Nazis, and/or Hitler. The work is copiously footnoted with long discursive footnotes, and sometimes the stuff in the footnotes is more interesting than the main text. The only problem I have with this (normally I LOVE proper footnotes) is that Lucaks uses a weird system of abbreviations for the works he writes about. Thus "JH" stands for Jäckel's Hitler in History and "GR" for Giesler's Ein anderer Hitler, etc. Why not use proper full citations and shortened citations? I don't know. Lukacs claims that the best overall biography of Hitler is Joachim Fest's. However, this book was written in 1997, one year before the first volume of Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography came out. Lukacs said mostly nice things about Kershaw in this book, so I wonder what he thinks of Kershaw's biography. (I know nothing of Volker Ullrich's new biography, the first volume of which has just been published in English.) ( )

3092. The Hitler of History, by John Lukacs (read 11 Jul 1998) This is by an able historian, born in Hungary who came to U.S. in 1946. A very learned book, it talks of controversies about Hitler I was ignorant of. The author is opinionated but makes lots of sense. One could spend a lifetime studying Hitler. He says the best bio of Hitler is Joachim Fest's, which I did read back in August of 1978. ( )