Though literary fiction is my preferred genre for reading, I find that I enjoy getting under my reading lamp with a piece of non-fiction occasionally.
It may be just your cup of tea, but if you give me a factual book on nuclear physics, I wouldn’t make it past the introduction. Ditto for books on Aristotelian philosophy or Burmese history. But if I read non-fiction in my area of interest, I can read it with pleasure.
So I would suggest that approach for you— read non-fiction in your area of interest, and you’ll get through it easily because you’ll already know something about the subject and have a bit of background. We read most easily about those things we already know.
One of my specific areas of interest is World War II. Though I was born when it was over, it was “The War” people still talked about as I grew up. Most of the men I knew as a child had been to “the war.” My dad and I watched Victory at Sea, about the war in the Pacific, on TV, and we kids played war games happily, though I think we’d get sent to counseling to correct that tendency today.
Two boys I knew lived across the street from my school, and I would sometimes see them leading their father around their yard to get some sun. He had been blinded by an explosion in “the war.” That scene brought the war to life for me.
So I had always wanted to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer’s hallmark history of Hitler, Nazism, and the German assault against all Europe that was planned to reach around the whole world.
I admit to being intimidated at first by its 1,280 pages, but, as with the 1300+ page Albion’s Seed that I reviewed last week, once I started Shirer’s massive book, I was hooked and excited each time I picked it up to continue reading, and if you’re already interested in the that war, I believe it will interest you in the same way.
William Shirer writes not as a scholar but as a journalist who first went to Germany in 1925, began writing and broadcasting events there for American radio in 1925 and reported the actual “rise” of Hitler’s dream empire, or reich until he was forced out by the Germans for exposing the evils of the regime to the West. Because of their passion for record keeping, the Nazis left mountains of documentation of what they believed would result in world domination, and it took Shirer years to wade through it and publish his world bestseller in 1960.
But because of Shirer’s journalistic style, the facts read like a story, fascinating and compelling, rather than a dry scholarly re-telling of events.
Shirer begins with the end of World War I and the punitive conditions under which Germany was forced to live after the armistice, though they had brought those conditions upon themselves by attacking Europe. Those conditions, however, gave Adolf Hitler an excuse to aggravate German resentment against the rest of the world and use it to lead them into another great war that would right the “wrongs done to Germany.
Shirer traces the key objectives which Hitler propagated and brainwashed the Germans to accept.
The first of these objectives was racial purity and supremacy. The Nazis taught that the Aryan (Germanic) race was superior and that it was therefore proper that they eliminate the unfit and other racial groups such as gypsies, Poles and Jews, which led ultimately to the Holocaust.
Other objectives for Germany resulted from that idea of racial purity: Lebensraum, or “room to live,” which meant that being the Master Race, Germany had the right to expand its territory by invading and annexing other nations like Austria; rejection of democracy, based on the fact that Hitler alone could get Germany to its manifest destiny so no other input was needed and no dissension allowed; and finally, cultural indoctrination, in which the Nazis controlled education, media and arts to shape public opinion, glorify themselves and destroy the Jews, whom Hitler gave to the Germans as a scapegoat for all their problems.
The later sections of the book describe the reasons for the fall of the reich, including fierce military resistance by the rest of the world, the growing resentment of his own military leaders against Hitler, and the deteriorating mental state of the Fuhrer himself.
This war chronicle is well worth the time you will put into it. If you have any interest in this dark period of history, take on The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
But buy your own copy. It’s going to take you awhile to finish.
