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  • Published: 1 April 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099532170
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

Hitler's Private Library

The Books that Shaped his Life




A brilliant and deeply resonant exploration of Hitler's reading habits; a unique exploration of his life; and a landmark in the study of the Third Reich.

He was, of course, a man better known for burning books than collecting them and yet by the time he died, aged 56, Adolf Hitler owned an estimated 16,000 volumes - the works of historians, philosophers, poets, playwrights and novelists.

For the first time, Timothy W. Ryback offers a systematic examination of this remarkable collection. The volumes in Hitler's library are fascinating in themselves but it is the marginalia - the comments, the exclamation marks, the questions and underlinings - even the dirty thumbprints on the pages of a book he read in the trenches of the First World War - which are so revealing.

Hitler's Private Library provides us with a remarkable view of Hitler's evolution - and unparalleled insights into his emotional and intellectual world. Utterly compelling, it is also a landmark in our understanding of the Third Reich.

  • Published: 1 April 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099532170
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

About the author

Timothy W. Ryback

Timothy W. Ryback is the co-founder of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation at Leiden University in The Netherlands. His previous books include the highly acclaimed Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life, which has been translated into more than twenty languages and was described by Ian Kershaw as ‘elegantly written, meticulously researched, fascinating’, and The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau, which was a New York Times Notable Book for 2000. He has been involved with several institutions dealing with international affairs and served as a lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University. He has also written for the Atlantic, the New Yorker and the New York Times. He and his wife reside in Paris.

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Praise for Hitler's Private Library

Elegantly written, meticulously researched, fascinating

Ian Kershaw

the nicely observed snapshots of his private life in which books played so big a part make this biblio-biography far more interesting than it looked when I first picked it up

Peter Lewis, The Oldie

Lively and entertaining survey of the dictator's reading ... a wealth of fascinating detail

Richard Overy, Sunday Telegraph

Enlightening

Clive Sinclair, Book of the Week, Independent

Ryback has made an original and interesting contribution to the study of this monster, not least by showing that, in some respects, he was just like many of the rest of us

Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph

Ryback's...volume is unique in its focus on a limited number of books and in the forensic attention he lavishes on them

Bertrand Benoit, Financial Times Review

Ryback has been able to draw a portrait of Hilter the reader, meticulous, critical and compulsive.

Alberto Manguel, Spectator

A fine analysis of the reading habits of a man whom the historian Ian Kershaw has called 'one of the most impenetrable personalities of modern history

Sunday Telegraph Magazine

A fascinating exercise in historical deconstruction

Simon Shaw, Mail on Sunday

Thoughtful and oddly intimate book

Mark Mazower, The Guardian

Ryback has created an intelligent companion to the countless existing biographies of Hitler

George Pendles, Financial Times, History books of the year

This fascinating study offers a chilling insight into the mind that conceived such unspeakable horrors.

Brian Maye, Irish Times