The Dartmouth Observer |
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Commentary on politics, history, culture, and literature by two Dartmouth graduates and their buddies
WHO WE ARE Chien Wen Kung graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004 and majored in History and English. He is currently a civil servant in Singapore. Someday, he hopes to pursue a PhD in History. John Stevenson graduated from Dartmouth College in 2005 with a BA in Government and War and Peace Studies. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He hopes to pursue a career in teaching and research. Kwame A. Holmes did not graduate from Dartmouth. However, after graduating from Florida A+M University in 2003, he began a doctorate in history at the University of Illinois--Urbana Champaign. Having moved to Chicago to write a dissertation on Black-Gay-Urban life in Washington D.C., he attached himself to the leg of John Stevenson and is thrilled to sporadically blog on the Dartmouth Observer. Feel free to email him comments, criticisms, spelling/grammar suggestions. BLOGS/WEBSITES WE READ The American Scene Arts & Letters Daily Agenda Gap Stephen Bainbridge Jack Balkin Becker and Posner Belgravia Dispatch Black Prof The Corner Demosthenes Daniel Drezner Five Rupees Free Dartmouth Galley Slaves Instapundit Mickey Kaus The Little Green Blog Left2Right Joe Malchow Josh Marshall OxBlog Bradford Plumer Political Theory Daily Info Andrew Samwick Right Reason Andrew Seal Andrew Sullivan Supreme Court Blog Tapped Tech Central Station UChicago Law Faculty Blog Volokh Conspiracy Washington Monthly Winds of Change Matthew Yglesias ARCHIVES BOOKS WE'RE READING CW's Books John's Books STUFF Site Feed    |
Thursday, July 15, 2004
Update II: Books The past four weeks I've read a couple of books that I think would make for excellent summer reading. One of them's Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, by the Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans. (David Pryce-Jones has a review of it here.) Irving's a prolific author who's written a great many books attempting to deny or downplay the Holocaust. When historian Deborah Lipstadt called him a "Holocaust denier," Irving sued her for libel in Britain (where the odds are stacked in favor of the plaintiff). Evans, a very distinguished scholar even before the trial, was brought in as one of several expert witnesses to demonstrate the validity of Lipstadt's claims. This he accomplishes superbly in Lying About Hitler, an absolutely engrossing book that I recommend to anyone interested in history, historiography, law, postmodernism, or - since it reads like one - detective stories. I should add that Evans's earlier book, In Defense of History is equally good (and in fact was one of the reasons why he was asked to defend Lipstadt). While we're on the topic of the Holocaust, I should probably mention the book I'm reading right now: George L. Mosse's Crisis of German Ideology, an intellectual and cultural history of Nazi ideology that begins in the middle of the 19th century with German Romanticism and Volkish thought, traces the rise of anti-Semitism and its institutionalization, and ends with the coming of the National Socialists to power as a logical (though not pre-determined) outcome of all that preceded it. |