some reviews

I've been indulging in the popular culture lately, and I thought I would share a few things with my faithful readers. I just finished two books, one that took my two months to read and one that took me two days. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer, is an incredibly informative and sobering read. Shirer and his CBS Radio colleague Edward R. Murrow were the voice of World War II for most Americans, and Shirer's firsthand observations of pre-1942 Germany and Berlin are fascinating. He diligently chronicles the twists and turns Hitler took on his way to power, and then shows how megalomania gradually took over the dictator and insured his demise. I came away from the book with several key observations: First, Hitler never told the truth, but people inherently trusted him. For some reason he could make people believe what he was saying, which enabled him to dupe all of Europe from Chamberlain to Stalin. Also, Hitler could have been stopped quite early on without much use of force. The first time he seized land outside Germany's borders was the Ruhr region of France, which was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles. At that time Germany's military position was so weak that any show of strength by the French would have caused Hitler's seizure to fail and almost certainly his government to fall. It took years for Germany to build up the strength it needed to start an open war, and at any point during that time the Allies would have been justified (according to the Treaty of Versailles) in stopping him. Nobody did. The greater evil is so often that good people simply sit back and do nothing. And finally, Hitler's knack for seizing the right opportunity at the right time during his rise to power was uncanny. Only when he had already gained supremacy in Europe did he start to make mistakes in his judgments of how foreign governments would react to him. This is an incredibly well-written book, and at nearly 1200 pages it needs to be to keep a reader going. Shirer focuses on the characters of Nazi Germany, which brings the history to life. Only in the diplomatic details of Germany's relationship with the USSR does he really get bogged down, but otherwise this is a comprehensive and fascinating history of the Nazi party and their twelve infamous years of power in Germany.

The second book, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, applies the concepts of epidemiology to societal phenomenon in a fascinating way. Gladwell observes that often a very small thing has a very dramatic impact on a product, idea, or condition in society, and he goes into great deal describing and analyzing this. He explains the phenomenon in three ways, focusing on the power of a small group of people to change society (the messengers), the staying power -stickiness, he calls it- of certain ideas (the message), and the environment where the idea emerges (the context of the message). The first thing to notice about this book is that Gladwell writes nearly flawless prose. It's effortless to read, but not like Harry Potter is effortless. Gladwell simply doesn't have those clunker sentences writers try to avoid because he describes difficult ideas with amazing clarity and elegance (The New Yorker didn't hire him for nothing). Second, the idea behind this book is just plain interesting. I've always been interested in culture and the way people work, but this takes it to a new level, challenging very basic assumptions in entirely persuasive ways. And that brings me to a third point: the book is impeccably researched. He documents every point so well that I never doubted his conclusions (and I'm normally a "suspicious" reader). He has wonderful illustrations and examples, both quantitative and qualitative. I'm so hooked I started browsing his web site and found several very interesting articles I hope to post about soon.

This week the Titanic 13 Film Festival started here in Budapest. I'm pretty excited because I've never lived in a big city that had a proper independent film festival. Calvin did a great job of showing some, but they simply didn't have the resources for something like this. Last night I saw "Green Street Hooligans," starring Elijah Wood. It's the story of a nerdy American kid who gets booted from Harvard, and ends up falling in with a gang of British football hooligans who support West Ham United. I was really impressed with the way the movie portrayed this kid's struggle between the need for acceptance and respect and his non-violent background. It doesn't glorify the violence (of which there is a lot, by the way), nor does it offer a blanket condemnation of the hooligan culture. The most powerful character is Pete, a History and PE teacher by day and the leader of the gang of hooligans by night. Everyone in the gang balances two lives, but none so poignantly as him. I highly recommend the film, but it is high on the violence and bad language.