Eight History Books and Five Novels

November, a month that culminates in Thanksgiving, is a good time to review history books—so let’s gallop through eight, starting with Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power (Knopf, 2024). Timothy Ryback weaves a story of betrayals, backroom deals, and one often-ignored aspect: the support Hitler received from dominant media.

Publishing mogul Alfred Hugenberg thought the 1,600 newspapers he controlled would give him power by popularizing the dictator: “If Hitler sits in the saddle, then I will have the whip.” Early in 1933, the day after supporting Hitler at a make-or-break moment, Hugenberg told a friend, “I just made the biggest mistake of my life.” A year later the publisher, kicked out of the cabinet, saw his news agency absorbed by Hitler’s Propaganda Ministry.

Hitler’s philosophy melded paganism and evolutionary “survival of the fittest.” Nadya Williams in Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (InterVarsity Press, 2024) shows that in pagan Rome citizens despised slaves, men devalued and abused women, and fathers could kill their children. Both democracy and humane treatment of the powerless depend on the recognition that God created all of us in His image.

Charles Taylor’s 600-page opus, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Harvard, 2024), has meandering insights about literature but notes toward the end that both Marxists and Nazis “gave Darwinism the last, crucial word…. Underlying both these inhumane theories stood the prestige of the reductive Enlightenment, whose basic epistemic principle was that humans can only be understood in language modeled on natural science.”

Christopher Cox’s Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn (published four days ago by Simon & Schuster) lays out Wilson’s belief that neither Blacks nor women were fit to vote. He called “Aryans” of northern Europe the best race, in part because they made women subordinate to men. Wilson said Africans, Turks, and Iroquois were “primitive” and “savage” races. In 1915 he showed in the White House, and endorsed, The Birth of a Nation, the silent film famous for defaming Blacks and quoting Wilson’s hat-tip to a “great Ku Klux Klan.”

The title of John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024) seems over-the-top: Weren’t Americans more satisfied three decades ago than we are now? But Ganz reminds us that third party candidate Ross Perot at one point outpolled George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke said, “I want Russia to be a strong power…. I don’t care if they follow certain articles of the constitution or not…. Russia needs a strong personality.”. 

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War (Princeton, 2024) is a scholarly look at refugee policy at a time when sending people “home” often meant imprisonment or death. Maurice Isserman’s Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism (Basic, 2024) readably relates the losing history of Gus Hall and other Communist Party leaders during the 1950s. Barry Werth’s Prisoner of Lies: Jack Downey’s Cold War (Simon and Schuster, 2024) is the story of America’s longest-held POW.

Notable fiction: Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, translated by Michael Hofmann (Melville House, 2024) is based on a true story about two ordinary Berlin residents who in 1940 take an extraordinary stand against the Nazis. Near the end, one going to his death receives consolation of two kinds. The first concerns productivity: “Nothing in this world is done in vain.” The second is personal: “Would you rather live for an unjust cause than die for a just one?”

Michael Idov’s The Collaborators (Scribner, 2024) is a hard-to-put-down spy novel. Jon Fosse won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, but his Trilogy (Dalkey Archive Press, 2022 new edition) tale of love and death seemed easy to put down when one paragraph stretched from page four to page eight. Then it grew on me.

Two crime novels feature aging, flawed protagonists. For Death at the Sign of the Rook (Doubleday, 2024), Kate Atkinson has fun bringing back private investigator Jackson Brodie, placing him in a classic British country house mystery, and giving him wry observations and internal dialogue, often in the voice of a former wife.

Ian Rankin’s Midnight and Blue (Mulholland, 2024) is the 25th book in a series featuring hard-living, corner-cutting, now-retired cop John Rebus. Old age has not been kind to Rebus. He suffers from COPD and is serving a prison sentence for murdering the man who controlled Edinburgh’s drug trade for decades. He lives under a cloud for the way his generation of cops operated. The death of a fellow inmate gives Rebus a chance to undertake a covert investigation and display his wiles.