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A review by libbyleigh1003
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
3.0
I have been waiting to read this book for years. The wait was not worth it and I am so disappointed.
First of all, the book is incredibly dense. Most non-fiction history books dense, but this was next level. I gave this book three stars because I could see it being valuable to students or others doing research on this topic. To read this whole book though was an undertaking and I would recommend taking it in little chunks or just jumping around to focus on parts most relevant to the reader. There’s no need to torture yourself reading cover to cover.
The reason I don’t recommend reading cover to cover leads me to my second reason for not particularly liking this book. He repeated a lot of information in the last couple of chapters that he already told us in the beginning. I understand he needed to conclude the book and wrap up his argument, but he didn’t summarize. It felt like he retold his whole argument over the final 50 pages. He also randomly brought up antisemitism in Christian communities at the end, but he didn’t talk about that anywhere else in the book. So while he spent a lot of time repeating himself, there were also times where he just started adding new information. Overall, I just don’t think the book wrapped up very cleanly.
Finally, he used the same big words over and over again. He used the word putative three times in one paragraph! There are so many synonyms he could have used that would have made that paragraph, and the rest of the book, so much less dense and less annoying. It felt like he was just trying to impress his audience with all these fancy words and in doing so he lost the readers focus on his actual argument. Learn new words, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
Overall, ok book, but mostly valuable for students doing research. Not meant for fun. New take on Germans approach to the holocaust, but so many things annoyed me about how he wrote the book that I couldn’t truly appreciate this new information.
First of all, the book is incredibly dense. Most non-fiction history books dense, but this was next level. I gave this book three stars because I could see it being valuable to students or others doing research on this topic. To read this whole book though was an undertaking and I would recommend taking it in little chunks or just jumping around to focus on parts most relevant to the reader. There’s no need to torture yourself reading cover to cover.
The reason I don’t recommend reading cover to cover leads me to my second reason for not particularly liking this book. He repeated a lot of information in the last couple of chapters that he already told us in the beginning. I understand he needed to conclude the book and wrap up his argument, but he didn’t summarize. It felt like he retold his whole argument over the final 50 pages. He also randomly brought up antisemitism in Christian communities at the end, but he didn’t talk about that anywhere else in the book. So while he spent a lot of time repeating himself, there were also times where he just started adding new information. Overall, I just don’t think the book wrapped up very cleanly.
Finally, he used the same big words over and over again. He used the word putative three times in one paragraph! There are so many synonyms he could have used that would have made that paragraph, and the rest of the book, so much less dense and less annoying. It felt like he was just trying to impress his audience with all these fancy words and in doing so he lost the readers focus on his actual argument. Learn new words, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
Overall, ok book, but mostly valuable for students doing research. Not meant for fun. New take on Germans approach to the holocaust, but so many things annoyed me about how he wrote the book that I couldn’t truly appreciate this new information.