Timeless Earth: 400 of the World's Most Important Places
Author: Hammond
Timeless Earth is a showcase of the Natural and Cultural sites that fall under the umbrella of UNESCO's World Heritage Program, chosen for their importance and significance to mankind and the planet. Readers are treated to breathtaking photography of some of the planet's greatest treasures, many of which are inaccessible to the average traveler.
School Library Journal
Gr 9 Up
Encyclopedia is an overview of Earth from its birth to the effects of human habitation, related by explaining physical processes and providing short explanations of specific examples worldwide. Chapters are heavily illustrated spreads, which include-given the book's focus on physical mechanisms-many labeled diagrams. The text covers such a vast number of features that it only provides a little information about each one, but the book will work well as a visual guide, its intended use. Though there is plenty here for high school students, some of the terms reflect the volume's scholarly origins and they are not always included in the glossary. Timeless Earth covers three categories of remarkable locations-"The Natural World," "Human Culture," and "The Modern World." These sections are further subdivided into chapters such as "Ancient Civilizations" and "Eastern Empires" in "Human Culture." Each entry covers a spread and consists mostly of well-captioned visuals. These are complemented by a box detailing the feature's country and its significance and a short, clearly written discussion (somewhat overlapping Encyclopedia ) of natural formation, construction, or artistic creation. These visual treats are solid guides to further research. Encyclopedia will find uses in history and social studies classes, while Timeless Earth will work best for earth science students.-Henrietta Thornton-Verma , School Library Journal
Book about: Leadership the Eleanor Roosevelt Way or Sniper One
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
Author: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion.
"Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."—New York Review of Books
"The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."—Philadelphia Inquirer
Publishers Weekly
Goldhagen's gripping and shocking landmark study transforms our understanding of the Holocaust. Refuting the widespread notion that those who carried out the genocide of Jews were primarily SS men or Nazi party members, he demonstrates that the perpetrators-those who staffed and oversaw the concentration camps, slave labor camps, genocidal army units, police battalions, ghettos, death marches-were, for the most part, ordinary German men and women: merchants, civil servants, academics, farmers, students, managers, skilled and unskilled workers. Rejecting the conventional view that the killers were slavishly carrying out orders under coercion, Goldhagen, assistant professor of government at Harvard, uses hitherto untapped primary sources, including the testimonies of the perpetrators themselves, to show that they killed Jews willingly, approvingly, even zealously. Hitler's genocidal program of a "Final Solution" found ready accomplices in these ordinary Germans who, as Goldhagen persuasively argues, had absorbed a virulent, "eliminationist" anti-Semitism, prevalent as far back as the 18th century, which demonized the Jews and called for their expulsion or physical annihilation. Furthermore, his research reveals that a large proportion of the killers were told by their commanders that they could disobey orders to kill, without fear of retribution-yet they slaughtered Jews anyway. By his careful estimate, hundreds of thousands of Germans were directly involved in the mass murder, and millions more knew of the ongoing genocide. Among the 30 photographs are snapshots taken by the murderers of themselves and their victims. (Mar.)
Library Journal
Though scholarly, this work, originally a Ph.D. thesis, promises to have a wide influence. Goldhagen (government, Harvard) endeavors to show that the common apologia for the Germans-that Hitler "brainwashed" them-is nonsense and that most Germans gave their active assent to genocide. An ordinary German commander, for example, might feel himself bound by a strict code of conduct yet not be at all averse to murdering Jews. The book ends with a detailed notes section and an appendix that explains the correct methodology for studying the Nazi period. Like Raul Hilberg's great Destruction of the European Jews, Goldhagen's work is a landmark in Holocaust studies. It does not supersede any of the standard histories of the Holocaust by Hilberg, Dawidowicz, Levin, Gilbert, and others simply because its primary aim is not to describe events but to explore and explain motivation. In so doing it provides a fuller understanding of the Holocaust. The work will be the subject of an international symposium held at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., on April 8. Highly recommended for most libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/95.]-Paul Kaplan, Lake Villa District Lib., Ill.
Salon
Henchmen did it. That's the common understanding of who perpetrated the 12-year Holocaust, during which six million European Jews were killed. "Hitler's henchmen"-- small bands of chiseled thugs in brown shirts, or elite wearers of the SS insignia. We emerge from a Leni Reifenstal film half convinced that it was a case of mass hypnotism, the mesmerization of a nation by endless rows of soldiers, columns of light, and the artful use of the millennium's most potent logo. It wasбmadness, and surely that degree of craziness has to be vigorously imposed on a people, right? In his new book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen argues powerfully against this conclusion -- and indicts the entire German nation in the process.
How could it have happened, is, of course, the crucial question. We tend to think, Goldhagen says, that Germany was a sane, modern nation, and that great coercion and a manufactured climate of fear must have been necessary to perpetrate evil on this mass scale. But Goldhagen argues convincingly that Germans could and did protest what they considered to be violent excesses on the part of their rulers: for example, the Nazi's euthanasia project, which was suspended after organized protests. The mentally ill and physically deformed targeted by that program were the Germans' own people; the Jews decidedly were not. The increasing degradation of the Jews, Goldhagen argues, provoked no sizable dissent because, as Hitler cunningly realized, anti-Semitism was deeply rooted in the vast majority of Germans to a degree not found in other modern nations. This enculturated anti-Semitism was, he says, "the mainspring of the Holocaust." The Nazis applied no significant force in order to bring about the Holocaust because "knowing that ordinary Germans shared their convictions, (they) had no need to do so.... The annihilation of the Jews made sense to them."
Goldhagen focuses on the rarely studied lives of thousands of ordinary people who rounded up, tortured, starved and finally killed their former neighbors. And he notes that the standard focus on the few factory-like extermination camps like Auschwitz, while understandable, draws us away from the fact that most of the killing of the Holocaust was a matter of one person clubbing or shooting another.
Hitler's Willing Executioners is a densely written work that reads like the doctoral dissertation it originally was (Goldhagen is an assistant professor at Harvard). But, more importantly, it is a deeply resonant book that will forever change the way we view one of the century's central events. This book will be talked -- and argued -- about for years to come, much like Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. And this new twist on the "banality of evil" concept is what's most chilling. It's not just that Germany's vicious leaders were average men under the surface that proves so disturbing; it's that so many average human beings became such uncomplaining murderers. --Edward Neuert
Kirkus Reviews
An explosive work that shatters many of the assumptions and commonly accepted myths concerning the Holocaust.
Goldhagen (Government and Social Studies/Harvard) offers irrefutable proof that will force us to reconsider our previous understanding of the Nazis' genocidal project. Traditional explorations tended to accept at face value the usual defenses offered by the Germans: Either they did not know of the genocide or they were compelled to participate against their will. In this exhaustively documented and richly researched work, Goldhagen documents conclusively that the people who actively participated in the extermination program were indeed "ordinary Germans," neither fanatical Nazis nor members of the dreaded SS. By carefully studying the personnel of the death camps and police battalions, the author reveals that they were not forced to participate, nor were they brainwashed by the Nazi regime. One of the book's many virtues is that it insists on placing antisemitism in a larger context; it permeated all segments of German society, including the proletariat, the professions, and the churches. Goldhagen thus offers a new conceptual framework for thinking about the Holocaust. Its documentation will make refutation nearly impossible. Further strengthening his case, Goldhagen focuses on hitherto neglected aspects of the Holocaust: the police battalions and the death marches that occurred toward the end of the war. Both aspects support his thesis that the genocidal plans of the Nazis found an eagerly receptive audience in Germany. By comparing Nazi policies toward Jews, Slavs, and the infirm (the Euthanasia Program was denounced and resisted by the Germans), we can more clearly see and understand the enormity of the crime and the complicity of "ordinary Germans."
A profoundly revolutionary work that demands a reexamination of the central moral problem of the 20th century.
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