A powerful and searing biography of Hitler and the poisonous ideas behind his actions.
Brendan Simms is Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge. His major books include Unfinest Hour- Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize) and Europe- The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present, which was published in 2013 to extraordinary reviews.
[Hitler] challenges some of our longstanding ideas about the man
who ruled Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 ... Highly
provocative.
*Financial Times*
If many Hitler books are scarcely worth reading, this one commands
attention through its originality and sheer intelligence ... A
thoroughly thought-provoking, stimulating biography which all
historians of the Third Reich will have to take seriously.
*Irish Times*
Casts new light on the dictator ... Crisp, well-written,
extensively researched ... A valuable contribution.
*Daily Telegraph*
[Simms] builds on previous scholarship to make a bold thesis - that
Hitler's principal obsession was not communism but rather
'Anglo-America' and global capitalism ... A vigorous, original
study that adds to the ongoing scholarship.
*Kirkus*
A radically new assessment of the Fuhrer's world view and the
motivation for his plunging the world into a terminal struggle for
survival.
*Daily Mail*
Impressive and intriguing ... By drawing our attention to the
centrality of historical emigration to Hitler's racial vision of a
Great Germany, Simms adds a new dimension to our understanding of
the thinking that drove history's most notorious figure. Crisply
written and well-researched, there is much in this book that
enlightens and stimulates.
*The Interpreter*
Compelling and original.
*London Review of Books*
Essential reading.
*The Tablet*
Simms ... challeng[es] much recent scholarship ... A preoccupation
with Anglo-American capitalism, he contends, drove the Third
Reich's ideology in its formative years, more than the oft-cited
obsession with Bolshevism ... He has made sound use of the Bavarian
archives.
*The Observer*
Hitler: Only The World Was Enough is modern political history at
its very best: thorough, impeccably well researched, and
opinionated without descending into histrionics. The
Dublin-Cambridge historian writes with authority, flare, style and
convincing conviction - consistently favouring thematic analysis
over the simple retelling of facts.
*Irish Independent*
Two major biographies of Hitler appeared this year. Brendan Simms's
Hitler: Only the World Was Enough concentrates unusually on the
Fuhrer's obsession with the strength of the British Empire and
America.
*The Telegraph*
A pathbreaking and elegantly written account of Hitler and his
foreign policy that is rooted in the existing literature but goes
beyond it to make new claims. Simms marshals considerable evidence
to show that Hitler was more preoccupied with a worldwide struggle
with America and Britain then he was by Jews and Bolshevism. His
claims of Aryan racial superiority masked concerns about German
inferiority; he hoped to improve the 'racial stock' by positive as
well as negative eugenics. Simms rejects revisionist claims that
see Hitler's foreign policy as constrained or compelled by German
society and institutions. A must read for anyone interested in the
Third Reich and the long shadow it cast over the 20th century.
*Richard Ned Lebow, professor of War Studies, King's College
London*
Brendan Simms has a bold hypothesis - that it was Hitler's fixation
on the United States and Great Britain, and his fear of German
decay and degeneracy that drove his strategic thinking and
behavior, and he argues it with exceptional eloquence and force.
This fascinating book will force us to rethink the strategy of the
Second World War in a way that none other has in more than a
generation.
*Eliot Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at
the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins
University*
After more than 100,000 publications on the evil of Adolf Hitler
and the Nazi responsibility for Second World War, it is difficult
to offer much new. But Brendan Simms has written a provocatively
novel interpretation of the ascendance of Hitler, and why he
prompted and lost a global war: his Hitler was always driven more
by envy and fear of Anglo-American capitalists than fright of the
Soviet Bolsheviks-and more from worries about the comparative
inferiority of the German Volk than from arrogance about its
purported superiority. Enthralling and enlightening revisionist
history at its best.
*Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Second World Wars*
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