The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer

This post continues the series on “a life in books”.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, by William L. Shirer, is one of the standard reference books on World War II. The book that I owned was actually the illustrated and abridged version of this work. Abridged versions of books are very rarely better than the original, but this one is an exception, due to the inclusion of many large high-quality colour photographs which the non-abridged edition does not have.

This photograph of the book doesn’t really give an idea of its size (it isn’t thick, but it has a large surface area):

I had bought the book partly for history class in high school, and partly because of a personal interest in totalitarian movements. (The photographs were very useful for various world history projects, and before the Internet took over the world, good photographs of Nazi-era Germany were not easy for a high school student to find, and could lead to awkward situations.)

I really like the book, but can’t keep it because it takes up too much space, and also because I don’t really have a use for it any more. And, due to its appearance and subject matter, it’s not the kind of book you leave lying around your house “for décor”.

I tried to sell it to some used bookstores, but they wouldn’t take it, apparently because books decorated with giant Nazi swastikas attract the wrong kind of crowd.

This book is among a bunch that I’ve donated to the Waterloo Public Library. I hope the librarians are less shy about having books about important periods in history on display than booksellers, and that high school students in the area will find it useful for their history projects just as I did.

– davinci 11781