Ian Kershaw’s 2008 biography Adolf Hitler condenses his two-volume biography (Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis) into a single volume that offers a compelling story of Hitler’s rise to power, followed by Nazi Germany’s descent into destruction.  Kershaw, who trained as a medievalist, sets out to answer two questions:  how was Hitler possible?, and how could Hitler exercise power?  He rejects the overly simplistic explanation that personality alone…

What is the end or purpose of education?  Have we designed our schools so badly that we’ve brought about the end of education?  The title of Neil Postman’s, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995) is intentionally ambiguous on these two questions, though I suspect readers of this book will infer how Postman might have answered them both.  Neil Postman was University Professor and Chair of the Department of Culture and Communications at New York University.  He…

Richard Pipes, formerly the Baird Professor of History at Harvard University, wrote many books on Russian and Soviet history.  A Concise History of the Russian Revolution condenses the events leading up to, during, and immediately following that event into roughly four hundred pages of accessible, highly engaging narrative and analysis.  The book appears to have been written for a general audience, not academic specialists.  Pipes divides his analysis of the Revolution…

Jacques Barzun’s book, interpretive and critical rather than merely encyclopedic, traces the development of Western cultural and intellectual life from the European Renaissance to the late 20^th century.  He argues that the end of the twentieth century also brought the end of five hundred years of Western cultural life, a change he laments.  For Barzun, the sixteenth century represents the dawn of modern Western culture while the twentieth century represents the…