I could not shake the notion I was reading this review not last night but in the near future. And not about Hitler but about someone else.
The review begins:
The impulsiveness and grandiosity, the bullying and vulgarity, were obvious from the beginning; if anything, they accounted for Adolf Hitler’s anti-establishment appeal. For Germany’s unpopular conservative elites, Hitler’s energy and theatrics made him an enticing partner when they appointed him chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933.
But anyone who thought the Nazis would be content with their share — that Hitler would rise to the occasion or be hemmed in by it, becoming a dignified statesman who sought compromise — was summarily purged from the system that conservatives assumed they controlled. An utter impossibility had become the indomitable reality. The Weimar Republic had become the Third Reich. It would take another world war, a genocide and millions of dead before the dictatorship finally collapsed in 1945, a full 12 years after Hitler was invited into power.
You do see what I mean, don’t you?
Please please please read the entire review. It’ll send chills throughout your system, just in case you haven’t had them for the past three and a half years.
P.S. I just read through it again. You MUST read it.