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50 Years Old and 56 Hours Long - Rise and Fall Still Relevant

I remember it well: the very fat book with the black dust jacket and the big black swastika in a white circle on the spine. It was William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Originally published in 1960 by Simon and Schuster, it sat on one of my parents' bookshelves for my entire childhood. It loomed large in many family libraries, just as World War II itself loomed large (directly or indirectly) in just about every aspect of popular culture during those years.

For people of a certain age, the subject still looms large, even 65 years after the war's end and 50 years since the publication of Shirer's book.

My good friend Neil Derrick is one such person, as is his partner Edward Field. Together, under the name of Bruce Elliot, the two of them wrote The Villagers, a magnificent, sweeping epic spanning two centuries in the life of a New York family.  

They both love history -- in particular the history of those years that left such a mark on them. Edward was in the war, flying bombing missions over Germany when he was little more than a kid. Neil was a little younger.

Neil lost his sight many years ago and is a big consumer of audiobooks, so I thought he would take notice when the first-ever audio edition of Shirer's book was published this July by Blackstone Audio and launched on Playaway September 1st.

The book runs over 1,000 pages, and the audio is 56 hours long -- though interested myself, I knew I wouldn't be listening to the full production anytime soon. I turned instead to Neil, who was undaunted and readily agreed to listen and share his impressions. Here's what he had to say:

I was 14 when the Second World War ended, so with all the Hollywood movies and newsreels, Hitler and the Nazis were a big part of my fantasy world, and have continued to be ever since. Although I have always been a devourer of books about the period, this book is filled with material I didn't know before. An American correspondent stationed in Berlin and Vienna through the whole Hitler period until we entered the war at the end of 1941, Shirer, who wrote this book in 1959, also had full access to the German archives after the war.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is dominated by World War II. Shirer makes clear that many of Hitler's generals and subordinates knew that the war was lost after the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. But they were in such awe and so frightened of their Fuhrer that they and their troops went on following his maniacal orders to the end. This led to the unnecessary sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of his troops, civilians under Allied bombing, and the murder of millions of Jews for another two years.

It's all here -- the rise of Hitler in the bierkellers of Munich, his early obsession with his young cousin who killed herself because of it and her replacement by Eva Braun, the spectacular Nazi rallies, Kristallnacht and the Holocaust, the 1944 conspiracy against him that came so close to succeeding -- it's 56 hours long, but I didn't skip any of it. Whenever I dozed, which is inevitable for me sometimes when lying on my bed listening to audiobooks, I went back to catch up. For me, this story of ultimate evil will always be fascinating.

William Shirer in 1961.It should be noted that a share of the credit for holding listeners' attention has to go to veteran narrator, Grover Gardner. This is just the sort of book Grover likes to sink his teeth into, and he carries the listener with him, on the whole long journey.

Shirer's book is definitely an investment in time for any reader, but now that it's finally available in audio, it's an investment that many in the "greatest generation" will, I think, be willing to make. Winner of the 1961 National Book Award, it's a serious work that has stood the test of time. WorldCat shows it included in the holdings of more than 6,000 libraries. This first-rate audio edition deserves to be a part of any serious non-fiction collection. And if you're concerned about shelf space -- all 56 hours fit onto a single HD Playaway.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Ill Fares the Land / Tony Judt, Farewell

The late author Tony Judt took the title of his final book from a line by Oliver Goldsmith, the 18th century Irish writer, poet, and physician remembered mostly for his 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield, his 1771 play, She Stoops to Conquer, and the children's tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes.

The "Ill fares the land" quote comes from his 440-line poem, "The Deserted Village" (1770):

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.''

At least half a dozen other authors have borrowed the same couplet for their books. Google Books lists:

Ill Fares the Land: the Consequences of Homelessness and Chronic Poverty for Children and Families in New York City by the Bank Street College of Education (1991);

Ill Fares the Land: Essays on Food, Hunger, and Power by Susan George (1984);

Ill Fares the Land: Land-use Management at the Urban/Rural/Resource Edges by the British Columbia Land Commission(1976);

Ill Fares the Land: the Famine Planned for America by Dan P. Van Gorder (1966);

Ill Fares the Land: a Play in Three Acts by Patrick McLoughlin (1957);

And probably most famously:  Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the United States by the great writer, activist, and longtime editor of The Nation magazine, Carey McWilliams (1942).

It seems only fitting for Judt's work to be part of such a long lineage.  As a historian, he knew well that the ideas he grappled with have deep roots -- extending back at least to the era of Goldsmith himself.

Judt's book was published this past March. He died in August of complications from ALS ("Lou Gehrig's Disease") with which he had been diagnosed in 2008. Since late 2009, the affliction had paralyzed him from the neck down.  But in October of that year he was still able to give a 2-hour lecture at NYU (where he had served on the faculty since 1987) on the history and future of social democracy. (A video and transcript are available online).

Ill Fares the Land grew out of that lecture, and in his introduction, Judt acknowledges the "unusual circumstances" under which it was written and thanks the small army of assistants who made it possible.

Judt's concern is the abandonment, over the past 30 years, of decades of progress in promoting social welfare and egalitarianism. From the late 19th century through the 1970s, he argues, the U.S., Britain, and the nations of western European all moved in essentially the same direction -- regulating economic activity, developing social welfare programs, promoting economic mobility, and narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Most of the history of the 20th century was marked, he says, by this more or less steady march toward greater social equality.

The long liberalizing trend ended, however, at the start of the 1980s when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher swept into office and set in motion a wave of privatization and deregulation and began the unraveling of decades of social legislation.

While the first three-quarters of the 20th century saw the gap between rich and poor shrink steadily, in the years since Reagan and Thatcher, economic inequality in Britain and the U.S. has grown to the point where the ratio of rich to poor is now comparable to that found in India and China.

The retreat from social democracy, says Judt, has continued for 30 years without pause, through the Clinton and Blair administrations and up to the present day, transforming the public mindset along the way.

Ill Fares the Land is his attempt to explain that "something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today" and to help us beyond a condition in which we are "unable to conceive any alternative". A lifelong teacher, Judt said he wrote the book "for young people on both sides of the Atlantic," and he speaks eloquently of just how much his students care about the world but "how inadequately we have prepared them."

Judt quotes from Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Maynard Keynes, and Malcom X in his attempt to explain where we are, how we got here, and how we might possibly revive that spirit of egalitarianism, the demise of which he details quite thoroughly, along with its attendant consequences.

Inter-generational economic mobility, for example, has deteriorated sharply. In comparison to the mid-20th century, today's poor are more far more likely to remain poor, and their problems are growing worse as the former social safety net is picked apart. As the book's title suggests, in Judt's view, hardship for so many is unsustainable.

The "symptoms of our collective impoverishment are all about us," says Judt, the result of "a collective failure of the will" that prevents us from recognizing the problems we face and robs us of the ability even to imagine any alternative way of organizing our society. And that's precisely what he calls for -- a new way of thinking about the role of the state and the organization of society.

Our fundamental problem in Judt's view is a "discursive" one -- our inability to "debate our shared interests." The remedies he suggests, while sometimes short on detail and sounding (as such remedies often do) like crying in the wilderness, are nonetheless a serious attempt to offer intellectual tools for the revival of a meaningful political debate about the future course of our society. For Judt, as a scholar and educator, the process must begin with renewed study of and appreciation for the accomplishments of 20th century social democratic progress. Out of this, he hopes that dissenters from free market fetishism will "find their voice."

The voice of the audio version (from HighBridge Audio) is Englishman James Adams, which seems appropriate for the work of an English-born author. Adams reads Judt's lucid prose smoothly, allowing listeners a chance to seriously engage the author's ideas.

Judt is not the first to put forth such ideas -- Lewis Lapham, Noam Chomsky, and others have been doing it almost from the very start of the 30-year era that Judt laments. But in his final work, Judt has left us a great deal worth considering. It's a book that deserves to endure and a fitting legacy for a brave and eloquent thinker whose insightful observations will be sorely missed.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Bankers, Singers, and Writers: Pulitzer Prize and NBCC Winners on Playaway (With a little Hank Williams thrown in for good measure.)

First things first: The correct pronunciation of "Pulitzer" (according to the folks at Columbia University who administer the Pulitzer Prize) is "PULL it sir". You may hear people saying "PEW lit sir," but those folks must be thinking of The Pew Charitable Trust or perhaps the character of Blind Pew in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (that's him as imagined by N.C. Wyeth on the artwork for the Blackstone Audio edition).

Now that we've got that cleared up... on Monday April 12, the Pulitzer Board announced the 2010 awards in Journalism, Letters, Drama, and Music. This year's winner in the History category was Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, available unabridged on Playaway from Tantor Audio.

Ahamed's book is a detailed examination of the careers of four men who's names are now all but forgotten but who were at the very center of the economic crisis that became the Great Depression. The four were:  Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Emile Moreau of the Banque de France, Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, and Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Though all were brilliant and dynamic figures, Ahamed blames the out-dated thinking and ill-fated decisions of these key central bankers for plunging the world into crisis.

Ahamed uses these four figures both to try to bring the dimensions of a global economic disaster down to a more human scale and also to exemplify the different national personalities of what were at the time the world's four economic superpowers.  Also prominently featured in the book is John Maynard Keynes, who represented a completely new way of thinking about world economics and central banking.

Ahamed himself is an economist and investment manager, and, interestingly, this is his very first book. Students of history (and of our present economic dangers) will find it highly readable, and, thanks to the capable narration of Stephen Hoye, highly listenable as well.

This year in the category of music, the Pulitzer Board awarded a posthumous "Special Citation" to country music legend Hiram King "Hank" Williams. His contributions to the understanding of global economics included the hit songs, "I Wish I Had a Nickel," "The Tramp on the Street," and "Wealth Won't Save Your Soul" (not to mention "There's a Tear in My Beer").

Elsewhere in the world of literary prizes, earlier this month The National Book Critics Circle announced their annual awards for the best books of 2009 in six categories. The winner for biography was Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life. The audiobook version, produced by Blackstone Audio and narrated by the talented and prolific Grover Gardner, is available on Playaway.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Invasion of Tarawa on NPR's Morning Edition 4 Great Audio Titles About War in the Pacific

Yesterday's Morning Edition from NPR [March 22, 2010] featured a story on Major Norman Hatch, USMC (retired), who served as combat cameraman during the Marines' amphibious assault landing at Tarawa atoll in the South Pacific in November 1943.

Hatch's footage was used to make With The Marines at Tarawa, a short film that shocked the civilian public and thereby helped galvanize support for the war effort. It marked the first time that Americans had seen such graphic footage of the fighting, the wounded, and the dead.  The film won an Academy Award in 1945.

The NPR story reflects a resurgence of interest in the Pacific war, sparked in part by the current HBO 10-part miniseries, The Pacific.

I wrote about the battle of Tarawa (and the film that Hatch made possible) last November when we released Utmost Savagery: The Three Days of Tarawa by Joseph H. Alexander.  Alexander's book is considered the definitive account of the Tarawa landing, which was the first major Allied assault of the Pacific War and a crucial test of the then-unproven strategy of amphibious war-fighting.  The title is a Playaway audio exclusive.

You can find my original post here. If you missed the NPR story, you can listen to it online.  The NPR site also has the complete video of With The Marines At Tarawa as well as a brief video interview with Norman Hatch from the U.S. Naval Institute's "Americans At War" series.

The U.S. Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Association sponsors a "Norman Hatch Combat Photography Award."  Read their bio of the photographer here. 

And by the way, the book that served as the basis of the HBO series -- Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific by Robert Leckie -- launches on Playaway May 1, 2010. 

Other Playaway titles about the Pacific war include: 

Hero of the Pacific by James Brady -- the story of Marine Gunnery Sergeant and Medal of Honor recipient John Basilone, expertly narrated by the gifted Grover Gardner.

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, available on Playaway from Recorded Books.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Remembering the War in the PacificUtmost Savagery: The Three Days of Tarawa(Playaway Exclusive)

Veteran's Day approaches, and on Nov 1 Playaway releases Utmost Savagery: the Three Days of Tarawa by Col. Joseph H. Alexander, USMC (retired).  This book is considered the definitive account of the first major amphibious assault landing of WWII -- "Operation Galvanic," the battle for the Japanese stronghold on Betio island in the Tarawa atoll (part of the Gilbert Island chain) in November 1943. 

Though horrifically bloody, the operation was an indispensable prelude to later amphibious operations -- at Normandy in 1944 and in the Pacific Theater right up until VJ Day.

Since its publication in 1995, Utmost Savagery has been included in the reading list of the U.S. Marine Commandant's Professional Reading Program.  This is the first audio version of the work, and it was produced by Playaway as part of our ongoing effort to provide all four branches of the U.S. military with relevant content in a high-quality, portable, simple and immediate format.

For those not familiar with the details of the war in the Pacific, the book offers an eye-opening account of the unprecedented scale and brutality of the fighting and the incredible valor, heroism, and sacrifice of the participants.  It's not just for "war buffs" but for any serious student of the 20th Century.

After you listen to Utmost Savagery you should take a look at With The Marines at Tarawa -- a 20-minute documentary film about the battle released in 1944 and mentioned in the book.   It's a fascinating document on many levels.  A skillfully constructed propaganda piece that accentuates the positive, the film also broke new ground by using actual combat footage, and it presented the American public with a far more graphic depiction of war than had ever before been seen.  It won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1945 and had a considerable effect on public opinion. 

The entire film can be streamed or downloaded for free from the Internet Archive.  Just go to:
     http://archive.org/details/WiththeMarinesatTarawa

It can also be streamed via YouTube in two parts:
     Part 1

     Part 2