Books, Arts & Manners: Subjects of Importance

The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940, by William L. Shirer (Little, Brown, 654 pp„ $22.50)

William L. Shirer went to Berlin in 1934 to cover Hitler’s Third Reich, which was to become the key assignment in the thirty-year-old foreign-correspondent’s life. This may, in fact, be understating the case, and understatement is something of which Mr. Shirer himself will never be accused. “Though I was not in his class,” Mr. Shirer writes, “I perceived that luckily I was roughly in the position of the great Greek historian, Thucydides, whose introductory words in his magnificent History of the Peloponnesian War came back to me: I lived through the whole war, being of an age to comprehend events and giving my attention to them in order to know the truth about them.”

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Joe Mysak

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The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940, by William L. Shirer (Little, Brown, 654 pp„ $22.50)

William L. Shirer went to Berlin in 1934 to cover Hitler’s Third Reich, which was to become the key assignment in the thirty-year-old foreign-correspondent’s life. This may, in fact, be understating the case, and understatement is something of which Mr. Shirer himself will never be accused. “Though I was not in his class,” Mr. Shirer writes, “I perceived that luckily I was roughly in the position of the great Greek historian, Thucydides, whose introductory words in his magnificent History of the Peloponnesian War came back to me: I lived through the whole war, being of an age to comprehend events and giving my attention to them in order to know the truth about them.”