At over seven hundred pages, I approached this book with a certain degree of trepidation; am I really that interested in Hamilton and what about his life could hold my interest.  Within a few pages, Chernow snagged me by bringing a man I knew little of into my life and presenting an exciting brilliant personality that fundamentally changed the course of history.

For decades, Robert Conquest, before his death was considered the premier expert on the rise of the Soviet Union.  His research was often criticized by those on the left but with the opening of the Soviet archives, his excellence was proven beyond a doubt.  In this book, he lays out what may be the greatest genocide in the world’s history, that of the Ukrainians especially during the years of 1929-1933.  During that time, as many fourteen million people were executed or starved to death in a deliberate policy designed to break the back of Ukrainian nationalism and the will of the peasants to resist Soviet power. 

Following decades of Civil War which costs Rome hundreds of thousands of dead, the rise of a 19-year old adopted son of Julius Caesar seemed improbable.  Aligned against him were the murders of Caesar and strongman Mark Anthony, all veterans of the wars, savvy politicians and holders of immense wealth and prestige.  How could a sickly, inexperienced youth hope to compete let alone survive against the forces aligned against him?  The strongest hand he had to play was that Julius Caesar had chosen that boy to inherit his mantle, his wealth, his name.

According to Marxist “scientific thought”, man is shaped by his environment; change the environment and you can create a “New Man”.  The same belief applies to plants and animals.  Thus, it was that while the Soviet Union spent more on scientific research than any other nation, they also managed to produce some of the worse examples of what we would call “junk science”. 

Meister Frantz Schmidt of Nuremberg was for 45 years a professional executioner and personally put to death 394 individuals and tortured, flogged or disfigured many hundreds more.  But Schmidt was not a cold-hearted sadist but a man whose father was forced to be an executioner (an individual who was so low on the social scale that he could not go to mass and his children could not be educated at any of the schools).

An excellent novel which focuses on the life of Baruch Spinoza, the seventeen century thinker and philosopher who was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam for questioning the basic precepts of the Torah, the existence of God, life after death and who had a huge impact on Goethe, Nietzsche, etc. 

This is the second novel by Yalom that I have read, and it is excellent.  Nietzsche is my favorite philosopher and if someone were to ask me how to begin understanding Nietzsche, I would recommend this novel. 

To Die for Germany, Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon by Jay W. Baird

It is easy for us today to remember the leadership of the Third Reich as almost comical characters; Hitler with his funny mustache, Goring, the fat man who wore make up and overdressed in gaudy uniforms with rings on his pudgy fingers, Goebbels with his deformed foot, etc.  It is easy to dismiss them until we remember that they were responsible for some of the greatest crimes in human history.  They led a nation that had been known for its science, philosophy, literature and music and turned it into a vast killing machine that had to be put down like a mad dog.  How was that transformation possible?  How could millions of ordinary people participate in such terrible crimes?

I first read this fine book in 2017 and with the completion of the Russian pipeline to China and more importantly directly to Germany, by passing the Ukraine and Poland, it is more timely than ever.

Winston Churchill once said that the wars of men would be much worse than the wars of kings, which is the premise of this excellent history of the change in European warfare as a result of the French Revolution.  Yes, the religious wars were terrible, as was the Thirty Years War, but to a large extent, the worst excesses of those wars (the slaughter of civilians) were the result of local conditions and not the policies of the engaged.  Indeed, the ethos of the pre-Revolution wars was based on the mores of the aristocrats who were able to move from the audience chamber (or boudoir) to the battlefield and back with ease.  Wars were largely wars of movement and position, for as Maurice de Saxe believed, a good General could spend his entire career successfully if he never had to actually fight a battle.