Grand unified books thread

[Pedrito]

I found this to be a very good read, though it's about Ungern-Sternberg in specific and not about the civil war in general:

http://www.amazon.com/Bloody-White-Baron-Extraordinary-Nobleman/dp/0465014488/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263338622&sr=8-1

Sweet, for Kindle.

about Ungern-Sternberg, the Kindle edition of Ossendowski's Beasts, Men and Gods, of which I've read very good reviews, is only $5.74 

L.

[BuddhaRhubarb]

Scalzi's Ghost Brigades is really really good, he finds ways to scald current pop culture in this future world, in very clever ways. Hard SF that's also LOL funny FTW!

[Alatriste]

I'm rereading 'Instrument of War: The Austrian Army in the Seven Years War Vol. I' by Christopher Duffy. Impressive, as all Duffy's works. One of these days I'm going to buy 'By Force of Arms' (The Austrian Army in the Seven Years War, Vol II) in Amazon, since after one year waiting I despair of ever finding it in a bookshop.

[Sheilbh]

The rather enjoyable but not terribly good 'Can you forgive her?'  The start of Trollope's Palliser series.  I found 'The Warden' to be the weakest of the Barsetshire books so I'm looking forward to the rest of the novels.

Not immediately though.  I'm planning some long-overdue Katzanakis time and then I'm going to enjoy The Great Jews.

[The Minsky Moment]

Recently read:
Mantel's Wolf Hall and DeLillo's Underworld

[Malthus]

Currently reading Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe by Mark Mazower. Very interesting information on Nazi mismanagement, and their future plans had they succeeded. How Hitler & Co. somehow never figured out that waging a war of racial extermination at the same time as one of unlimited territorial aggrandizement does. not. make. sense. (or, where shall we put the Poles, and where shall we conjur up another 100 million Germans?) 

The horrifying implications of Nazi logic are stated to be that the Jews were just the beginning of the Nazi ambitions for genocide; pretty clearly (according to the authour, who makes a good case), certain elements among the Nazis had the same fate in store for lots of other disfavoured nationalities, once the war was won.

As with everything Nazi, there seemed to have been no one clear plan; Hitler seemed to relish setting one faction off against another. Yet he was very consistent in one thing: all arrangements with others were to benefit 'Germans' only (though the question of just how exclusive a title "German" is seems to have been a matter of debate). Again, nationalist exclusivity makes a poor basis for imperial pretentions, particularly if one is obsessed with avoiding "race mixing". The logical outcome of holding these two notions (expansion and absolute exclusivity) simultaneously, is to invade everywhere and kill everyone not "German" or at least of an acceptably german-like ancestry as in western Europe ... which seems, within the confines of Europe, to have been more or less the long-range plan held by Hitler.     

[ulmont]

The horrifying implications of Nazi logic are stated to be that the Jews were just the beginning of the Nazi ambitions for genocide; pretty clearly (according to the authour, who makes a good case), certain elements among the Nazis had the same fate in store for lots of other disfavoured nationalities, once the war was won.

I thought it was pretty well accepted that the Slavs were going to be next after the Jews?

[Malthus]

The horrifying implications of Nazi logic are stated to be that the Jews were just the beginning of the Nazi ambitions for genocide; pretty clearly (according to the authour, who makes a good case), certain elements among the Nazis had the same fate in store for lots of other disfavoured nationalities, once the war was won.

I thought it was pretty well accepted that the Slavs were going to be next after the Jews?

I don't think there was really any one plan. Different factions of the Nazi hierarchy had different, often mutually contradictory, plans. Many wanted to run basically feudal estates with slavic serfs, carefully "culled" like spartan helots to ensure ignorance and docility. Others thought that this would inevitably lead to "race mixing" and wanted to essentially "deport" the slavs en mass (using exactly the same terms previously used for the Jews - 'deportation' being pretty clearly a euphemism for mass executions). The lands the slavs lived on would then be settled by German farmer-soldiers.

Problem was, where were they going to get the Germans from?

[Ed Anger]

Hitler Triumphant by a bunch of people. Reads like somebody's wargame session. In other words, mostly gamey bullshit.

LOLZ, I DROP STUDENT ON BAKU! *rolls dice* DE! YOU LOSE YOUR OIL.

Cost: 2 bucks. May have overpaid.

[Queequeg]

I really don't understand what the Germans had against Slavs though.  Were the Balts in the same boat?  The Slavic, Baltic and Germanic people have way more in common than they do differences, from a genetic, cultural or linguistic standpoint.  Heck, they even look a lot alike; Hitler could have easily passed for Czech (and iirc his name is of Czech or other West-Slavic origin), so could most of the German higher-ups. 

[HisMajestyBOB]

I just finished The Undercover Economist - it's a pretty good book that's a nice intro to economics. Recommended.

[Syt]

Half way through Brin's Sundiver. They've just encountered the Solarians and watched an old Magnetovore give birth to little ones.

Good read so far.

[The Minsky Moment]

I really don't understand what the Germans had against Slavs though.  Were the Balts in the same boat?  The Slavic, Baltic and Germanic people have way more in common than they do differences, from a genetic, cultural or linguistic standpoint.  Heck, they even look a lot alike; Hitler could have easily passed for Czech (and iirc his name is of Czech or other West-Slavic origin), so could most of the German higher-ups.

Why would you assume that Nazi racial theory would have any coherent scientific or anthropological basis?  Its all nonsense on stilts and a fool's errand to try to make sense of any it.

[Malthus]

I really don't understand what the Germans had against Slavs though.  Were the Balts in the same boat?  The Slavic, Baltic and Germanic people have way more in common than they do differences, from a genetic, cultural or linguistic standpoint.  Heck, they even look a lot alike; Hitler could have easily passed for Czech (and iirc his name is of Czech or other West-Slavic origin), so could most of the German higher-ups.

I don't think there has to be any "reason" to understand. The Nazis themselves, although the killed millions in pursuit of "scientific racism", had no better idea than anyone else what actually constituted a "German" in the first place, and for all their pseudo-scientific "race measurements" did not reach any agreement even among themselves as to whether being "German" was a matter of genetics, or culture, or alleigance, or what.

Indeed, the more one studies the Nazis, the more one sees that there was really no coherence at all in their plans or theories. In a really deep sense, they were nuts - not because they were so radically evil (though they were), but because that evil was exercised in pursuit of a set of plans that were arbitrary and self-contradictory in the extreme, and in the most basic of ways made no sense.

[Josephus]

I'm currently reading a really good book. It's an absurdist humour book, in the vein of Good Soldier Svejk. It's called City of  Thieves and takes place in Leningrad during the seige of 1941. Amidst all the starvation and death, two petty criminals (One, a deserter, the other a teenage boy who stayed out after curfew) are given a reprieve by the NKVD colonel. Instead of summary execution, they're given four days to find a dozen eggs, so the colonel's wife can bake a cake for her daughter's wedding.
It's really good.