Volume 20, Number 9 · May 31, 1973
Hitler and Hirohito
By Geoffrey Barraclough
Japan's Imperial Conspiracy
by David Bergamini
Pocket Books, 1,440 pp., $2.25 (paper)
To be published in the United States in October.
China and Japan at War, 1937-1945: The Politics of Collaboration
by John Hunter Boyle
Stanford, 430 pp., $16.50
The United States and East Asia
by Richard W. Van Alstyne
Norton, 180 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Britain and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1939
by Bradford A. Lee
Stanford, 319 pp., $10.00
The United States and Europe
by Max Silberschmidt
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 216 pp., $3.95 (paper)
One of the worst pieces of news reaching me recently through the publishers' grapevine—worst, that is to say, in the small closed world of books and history, for there is plenty of other hair-raising news in the world around us—is that 1973 is to be 'Hitler's year.' When, one sometimes despairingly asks oneself, are historians going to grow up? If we are going to celebrate the anniversary of 1933, more repetitious books on the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler are the last thing we need. Not that the time has come to close the ledger on the 1930s. Far from it. As, one by one, the familiar problems of the Thirties—including (to go no further than this morning's newspaper) 'competitive devaluation,' 'exchange rates warfare,' and a 'world depression'[1]—loom up across our horizon, it is obvious that we need to know more, not less, about the decade that led up to World War II. But it is important that we should get our priorities right.
Review, 5934 words
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