3.0
Hitler's Private Library
ByPublisher Description
A Washington Post Notable Book
With a new chapter on eugenicist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race
In this brilliant and original exploration of some of the formative influences in Adolf Hitler’s life, Timothy Ryback examines the books that shaped the man and his thinking.
Hitler was better known for burning books than collecting them but, as Ryback vividly shows us, books were Hitler’s constant companions throughout his life. They accompanied him from his years as a frontline corporal during the First World War to his final days before his suicide in Berlin. With remarkable attention to detail, Ryback examines the surviving volumes from Hitler’s private book collection, revealing the ideas and obsessions that occupied Hitler in his most private hours and the consequences they had for our world.
A feat of scholarly detective work, and a captivating biographical portrait, Hitler’s Private Library is one of the most intimate and chilling works on Hitler yet written.
With a new chapter on eugenicist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race
In this brilliant and original exploration of some of the formative influences in Adolf Hitler’s life, Timothy Ryback examines the books that shaped the man and his thinking.
Hitler was better known for burning books than collecting them but, as Ryback vividly shows us, books were Hitler’s constant companions throughout his life. They accompanied him from his years as a frontline corporal during the First World War to his final days before his suicide in Berlin. With remarkable attention to detail, Ryback examines the surviving volumes from Hitler’s private book collection, revealing the ideas and obsessions that occupied Hitler in his most private hours and the consequences they had for our world.
A feat of scholarly detective work, and a captivating biographical portrait, Hitler’s Private Library is one of the most intimate and chilling works on Hitler yet written.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesHitler's Private Library Reviews
3.0
“Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
What a fantastic book! I learned so much about a really morbidly interesting topic.
My other half discovered this one on a bookshelf at the library on our last visit. It was something that I tried to ignore, just laying on the shelf. In the end, before I checked out the rest of the books I wanted, I nabbed this one.
I read one of the other books first. Then I tucked in.
Honestly, fascinating. The character of a person can absolutely be gleaned from the books they choose to read.
Hopefully this choice of mine just means I’m very curious about the world.
But the books that Hitler did read and DNFed are a really interesting set of works.
It really gave me an insight into the man and why he thought the way that he did.
And you know what the biggest surprise was… everyone at the time pretty much had the same hateful, bigoted and evil views. That Hitler has been loaded up as a sort of boogie man of extreme views… when really he was pretty typical of the leaders at the time.
History gets written from a very narrow viewpoint. If you lose sight of the context, you fall foul of the mistake of thinking that evil is rare and far behind us.
Keep your eyes open, very similar figures are around today. I need not go to great pains to draw direct parallels between Musk and Ford.
Definitely worth a read if you enjoy learning about the time period.”
“more like Hitler's biography based on books he read in each chapters if his life.
hope to see more book related stuff”
About Timothy W. Ryback
Timothy W. Ryback is the author of The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau, a New York Times Notable Book for 1999. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He is cofounder and codirector of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation and lives in Paris with his wife and three children.
Other books by Timothy W. Ryback
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