Mark Mazower's "Hitler's Empire"

This book is frustrating. At times it is beautifully written. At other times it drags and seems pointless with mind-numbing details. I admit, I don't understand the author's intentions. If this is meant to be a scholarly treatise, it seems to read too much like a novel. If it is intended to be popular history, it is too dry, too detailed, and loses the reader in the swamp of words.

There are some interesting details about WWII that I wasn't aware of. But there is an awful lot of details which are presented in a way that swamp the reader. There needs to be a better framework. The author needs to present a thesis and build an argument and provide less of an endless wasteland of details.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. It is a shame because the author has a real talent for writing. Sadly, he lost sight of his reader. This book has too much detail without purpose. History should be a narrative, i.e. the author is driving home some point of view. All I see in this book is an endless horizon of boring detail, a kind of gray goo everywhere. Interesting goo at times, but what am I to do with the slop? I want purpose. I want to know what this goop if good for, what it means, why it should be important to me.

One point this book hammers home is the mind-numbing evil of the NAZIs and their horrible treatment of everybody not of their "racial type". But oddly the book ends with the suggestion that Hitler's "New Order" shaped modern Europe and that Hitler was a visionary. He was a madman. He was a fanatic with an ability to lure people into his perverted view of history and his racist view of people. But, despite all the facts that Mazower marshalls, I do not believe that there was any "intellectual legacy" from Hitler and the crazed people he surrounded himself with. If that is "history" then I want nothing of it. I want my history to be one where evil is defeated. Where slimeballs don't keep crawling out of the woodwork and into positions of power again and again.