RaveThe Washington PostJähner’s new history of the Weimar era vividly portrays and endorses this spirit of excess ... Its very title, Vertigo, fittingly conjures the sensation of spinning dizziness ... He excels when he takes us into the ballrooms and pleasure palaces of a new entertainment culture, where reveling citizens listened to jazz and danced the Charleston ... There is a palpable nostalgia for Weimar on his final pages, a sadness that this exhilarating awakening ended in the human catastrophe of Nazism and World War II. Yet his account is not fatalistic.
Margaret MacMillan
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)The book is divided into nine chapters that deal, in a remarkably comprehensive way, with a wide array of themes, such as the reasons for conflicts and the ways in which societies commemorate wars. In between, we find out how different societies at different times waged wars and what distinguishes pre-modern wars from modern conflicts. The result is an eminently readable reflection on armed conflict throughout human history ... As this brief overview of the multiple consequences of war suggests, MacMillan’s book is much more than an operational history of military campaigns. The author also poses the complex question of what future wars might look like ... despite this note of caution, the book is delightfully readable. The author wears the immense scholarship underpinning the book lightly. Her writing style is crisp and there is an enviable clarity of thought ... another fine achievement, and should be widely read by those wishing to understand how armed conflict has shaped, and continues to shape, the world in which we live today.
Brendan Simms
MixedFinancial Times (UK)While his focus is on Anglo-America, Simms also does an excellent job in integrating some of the more recent specialized literature on the other international forces that shaped Hitler’s ideology ... While there is much to be said for Simms’ insistence that the Anglo-American west and international finance capitalism have not received enough attention in previous accounts of Hitler’s world view, there is of course a danger in pushing these arguments too far ... Hitler did indeed spend a great deal of time thinking about global capitalism and \'the West,\' but there is no obvious reason to highlight this at the expense of his other obsessions ... If—as Simms suggests—Hitler’s admiration and fear of the British and Americans was boundless, he certainly did a terrible job of acting on those fears.
