ResoluteReader: August 2026

Thursday, August 20, 2026

Ivan Doig - Prairie Nocturne

Almost all of Ivan Doig's novels are, like Doig himself, rooted in Montana - even when they stray out of the state. Prairie Nocturne takes as its jumping off point the communities of Two Medicine County, the fictional area of Montana based upon the ranching and farming area were Doig grew up. Earlier novels set here followed the lives of two intertwined families and they feuded over land and ancient disagreements. Prairie Nocturne takes two character briefly mentioned in other works and sets them up as disparate lovers and friends.

Susan Duff was the singing schoolchild in Dancing at the Rascal Fair, taught by one of that books main characters. By the time that Prairie Nocturne is set, she has developed into a brilliant opera singer and performer, whose career in Europe and America made her a famous name. Now retired back in Two Medicine County, she's teaching singing to unskilled children. Wes Williamson was her lover, though he was married and the potential scandal derailed his political career. Wes met Susan in France when she was there as part of a delegation to commerate the deaths of thousands of US servicemen in the trenches of World War One. Susan's husband had served with Wes, and they are brought together passionately.

Back in Montana Wes is a major landowner, a fair and liberal man, who is constantly trying to expand his holdings. Readers of other novels by Doig, set before and after this one, will know the Williamson family as the opponent over the hill, whose ranching often frustrates smaller farmers. Their hope to get the McCaskill land forms much of the backdrop to other stories.

But in this between the wars novel, Wes' finds that one of his ranchhands, Monty Rathbun, a black worker and Wes' chauffeur. Monty has in Wes' ears a brilliant voice that deserves to get out into the world and Wes returns to his former lover to give Monty the training he needs.

While the training of Monty and the launch of his steller career form much of the base of the novel, Monty's backstory as the son of a Buffalo Soldier on the Plains during the war against the Native Americans and Wes and Susan's story are also central. Doig's traditional weaving of stories and times together give a characteristic epic feel to the book. But there are two other linked factors that make this book a cut above the average. The first is the question of racism. Montana had, and has, a very small black population, and thus black people do not feature frequently in Doig's novels. Nor do Native Americans, but that's a separate problem. Monty's presence, and particularly his (chaperoned) lessons with Susan are cause for comment and lead to the KKK making itself known. These scenes are traumatic but speak to a reality that is often forgotten among those who know Montana for its natural beauty.

The second, linked, factor is Monty's destination. While destined to become a famous singer across America, it is in Harlem, as part of the Harlem Renaissance where he comes into his own. This part of the book is well done and Doig gets across a real sense of Harlem as a place of refugee and cultural innovation, as well as poverty and crime.

These stories link well. It's one of the stronger of Doig's novels and while some readers will enjoy the links to earlier stories and novels, this is a book that can be read independently.

Related Reviews

Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun
Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America
Doig - English Creek
Doig - Dancing at the Rascal Fair
Doig - Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

Stephen King (Richard Bachman) - The Long Walk

The gameshow format exploded in popularity in the US in the late 1950s. The promises of instant wealth and exotic prizes combined with flamboyant hosts became a global phenomena, that has never really ended, merely changed. By the mid-1960s, when Stephen King began writing, they were a central part of US culture and had been exported globally. It is no surprise then that they offered a fertile ground for dystopian writers.

The Long Walk was the first book King wrote. But it was not the first he published. That honour went to Carrie. The Long Walk languished until 1974 when it was published under the pseudonymn Richard Bachman. Eight years later King/Backman published The Running Man. Given that both novels concern a horrific, murderous, game show it is hard not to compare the two.

The Long Walk consists is a competition walk. Entrents, all boys, compete to walk the furthest. This continuous walk must be completed at a speed never less than four miles per hour. Those who fall behind are warned. After three warnings, the next time the speed drops below 4mph, accompanying soldiers execute the unfortunate boy. But the boys can regain warnings by recovering and keeping going for an hour. The last walking boy wins whatever they want and need for life. In the grim poverty stricken society of this alternate America, hundreds of boys are willing to risk death for the chance to lift their families from poverty and drudgery.

The bulk of the novel is the story of the walk. The boys make alliances, friendships and help each other. They occasionally share snacks, and tell each other their life stories. Several boys avoid this, indeed one of them actively tries to sabotage the others. In other words the game that is designed to foster competition actually ends up forcing collaboration. At least until the end of the walk nears.

There are, of course, parallels with The Running Man. There a game player has to avoid their own murder and must rely on their ability to escape pursuers while trusting on the help of strangers who have a vested interest in handing the player in to authorities for a reward. Both stories suffer a little from the period when they were written. The Long Walk is not televised as TV cameras require cables. So crowds gather, and no doubt, news reports on progress allow people to know how their bets have turned out. But the crowds are not baying for blood, they're encouraging the walkers and often not in a partisan way. King here, as in The Running Man, tends to have a more positive view of human nature. That said, there's little in this book about the origins of the Walk and the role it plays in society. The leader of the troops, the Major, is anonymous. He wears reflective sunglasses and seems to have a hero status in the eyes of those he is threatening. In The Running Man there's a much more explicit acknowledgement that the games are a release valvue for a society whose tensions are high due to its economic and politics contradictions.

Thus The Long Walk, in part because of the nature of the game itself, and in part because of how King writes it, is less a story of dystopiansm and more a story of individual survival against violence and against the odds - albeit one where several characters only get as far as they do because those they compete against help them. The Running Man, on the other hand, is a deeper exploration of a society were the downtrodden find ways to resist and there's broader solidarity among the oppressed. The Long Walk's central premise doesn't allow King to draw this out, and so it's tempting to see the later novel as a fuller exploration of the themes in King's first work.

That said - do read The Long Walk. While it's story seems dystopian, we should not forget that America had dance competitions to win a prize, with the last couple standing taking the prize. Or the British games show "Touch a Truck" which saw similar feats of individual endurance to win a prize. While no one has yet murdered anyone for a 21st century game show, it doesn't seem unrealistic.

Saturday, August 15, 2026

Bill McGuire - The Fate of the World: A history & future of the climate crisis

Bill McGuire is a respected geologist and climate scientist. His new book presents climate science, viewed through the prism of historical geological processes, to a non-academic audience. Reading it in the middle of a summer of unprecedented heatwaves it is both prescient and terrifying. McGuire's argument is quite striking. He shows how the processes that have taken place in deep geological times to the Earth and its interconnecting systems, have parallels and similarities with the abrupt changes that are being made today. We can draw on those historical events (and we are sometimes talking about events millions of years ago) to understand the impact of human driven climate crisis today. McGuire writes:

If a temperature hike of 1.5°C, 2°C or even more happened over the course of tens of thousands of years, it would barely be noticed - either by us or by the countless other species we share our world with. Ice caps would still melt, seal levels would still climb, weather patterns would evolve, but everything would happen at a pace that would leave plenty of time to adapt... What we always need to keep in mind is that the heat today is building at a rate many times faster than anything that nature - left to its own devices - has accomplished in the more than four billion years of the Earth's existence.

Embedded in this general scientific point is another. Running through McGuire's book are arguments that tackle the anti-scientific arguments of the "climate deniers". While McGuire is at times explicit, the book itself is designed to inform the general public and non-scientists with the arguments that counter those of the fossil fuel corporations, their supporters and climate change deniers. It should also serve to give confidence to non-specialists that scientists have a clear understanding of what it currently taking place and the models with which they predict the future.

What of the future? McGuire suggests that what we are facing is a return to historic conditions, including a return to what is known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a hyper-thermal (period of rapid temperature change on geological time scales), which took place about 56 million years ago. This was a period that saw rapid heating, and the release and absorption by the atmosphere and oceans of huge amounts of carbon dioxide, likely due to volcanic activity. The period also saw the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, in vast quantities from deep in the oceans. The fear for today is that the artificial release of greenhouse gas, driven by capitalist production, has the potential to release far more greenhouse gases. As McGuire explains:

While volcanologists predict no large-scale volcanic outburst in the near future, our cooler world holds far greater quantities of methane, trapped in extensive submarine gas hydrate deposits and beneath the Arctic tundra.

In the context of our current warming planet, the potential for the massive unleashing of further greenhouse gases is extremely dangerous. McGuire explains the threat that such releases could have on our contemporary Earth systems:

Times when the climate is changing especially rapidly relfect the application of some specific driving force or forces. Today, breakneck global heating is being foircd by the colossal quantities of greenhouse gases we continue to dump into the atompshere. The study of naturally occuring episodes of abrupt climate change reveals that they can result in konck-on effects that can cascade in such a way as to bring about other sudden changes in elements of the climate system... this is set to bring about nasty and unwanted shocks and surprises, which are the last things we need... The ramped-up heat is acting to accelerate melting of the polar sea ice and land-based ice sheets, incre ase methane degassing... and significantly slow the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). Via positive feedback loops and the crossing of tipping points, such domino effects can and do magnify abrupt climate change and its ramifications.

One of McGuire's case studies here is the AMOC and the impact of it slowing or stopping. The answer is terrifying. North West Europe, and particularly the British Isles, will suffer a rapid cooling of perhaps 5 to 10 degrees on average. That will destroy the climate, our agriculture and lead to millions of people fleeing to warmer parts. There's an irony here that a warming world's biggest disaster for Western Europe will be the dramatic (if temporary) cooling. But it will be enough to kill millions. In fact, all the scenarios that McGuire outlines, will kill. Writing about previous mass extinction, he argues that elevated CO2 levels are a key "kill mechanism". Human driven climate change will be no different. By 2070, between 1 and 3 billion people will be "living under climatic conditions beyond anything experienced in the history of civilisation."

What then of McGuire's solutions? He is clear that the driver of climate change - the industrial emission of massive quantities of greenhouse gases is the result of our political system:

We are not the first life form to modify the planet to the detriment of all else, but we have to go back a couple of billion years to the last time this happened. Then too, it wasn't intentional but a by-product of success. Not of a political-economic system, but of the burgeoning of growth of life that was completely out of tune with what had existed previously... rampant consumer-based capitalism is not compatible with a sustainable existence on a small planet.

Later McGuire blames "our acquisitive lifestyle" and says " we cannot go on living as we are if we wish to maintain any vestige of a functioning civilisation". But then says we should "collectively hang our heads in shame that - by our selfishness, ignorance ad inaction - we have allowed this to happen".

Here I have some disgreements. Firstly I'm struck by McGuire's use of the term "consumer-based capitalism". Capitalism is a system of production. And it is production where we should be targetting our anger rather than some misplaced collective guilt. Production after-all is were fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions are concentrated, and production is driven by the need for the capitalist class to accumulate. Mcguire concludes if "we" continue to dig up and burn fossil fuels at our current rate, vast parts of the world will enter "geologically novel" climates. But who is "we" here? The digging is being done by coal, oil and gas companies. Not ordinary people. We are trapped in a system whose logic is to put profit before people and planet. Collectively however, we have the power to change things.

McGuire is pessimistic. Or at least realistic. His three future scenarios don't see the world remaining as it is now, or returning to what it might have been 20, 30 or 50 years ago in terms of climate. Rather he envisates if we are "astonishing lucky" a Pliocene climate. Realistically a "return to Miocene conditions". That will require us to act, and while McGuire doesn't make the this conclusion directly, it has to be action that will curb and stop fossil fuel extraction and use, and the transition of our economies to a more sustainable one. I would argue that would need to be one based on the rational, and democratic, planning of production.

To be fair to McGuire he has not set out to right a socialist critque of capitalism's environmental destruction. What he has done however, is remarkably useful to environmentalists and activists worried about capitalism's death drive. Reading Bill McGuire's excellent book will arm you with the knowledge you need to tell people what the heatwaves we are facing mean. If that information is used correctly it can help to build the sort of movements that will challenge fossil fuel capitalism. So read The Fate of the World today - you won't be cheered up, but you will be emboldened and informed.

Thursday, August 13, 2026

Emmanuel Terray - Marxism and "Primitive" Societies: Two Studies

Emmanuel Terray was a French political activist and Marxist anthropologist whose work was enormously important in the development of anthropological ideas. This short book is a collection of two seminal pieces, translated from French, wherein Terray grapples with the relevance of Marxism to anthropology. He does this by exploring the work of two other influential figures. The first of these is Lewis Henry Morgan whose work formed the foundation of anthropological science and deeply influenced Marx and Engels. Engels in fact used much of Morgan's book Ancient Society to inform his own work Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State.

Terray argues that while Morgan's work was incredibly important, Ancient Society (published in 1877) was much more controversial, because it "committed the mortal sin of evolutionism". After quoting some critics, including Claude Levi-Strauss, Terray sets himself the task of studying "Morgan's language to note not only waht is said in that language, but also what is said in spite of it". In doing so Terray makes a series of important contributions to Marxist anthropology as a science and a method. I should note here that I am not an expert in anthropology, or the works discussed. What matters to me is the process of exploration.

Terray writes that Morgan applied core ideas from Darwinism to human societies. Terray then writes:

It is temptng to close the investigation and conclude that Morgan's "genius" lies in having applied to human evolution the concepts Darwin developed to explain natural evolution.

But he cautions that Engels had this to say on Ancient Society:

Within the limits set by his subject, Morgan spontaneously discovered Marx's materialist conception of history, and his conclusions with regard to present-day society are absolutely communist postulates. The Roman and Greek gens is for the first time fully explained by those of savages, espeically the America Indians and this gives a solid base to primitive history.

But as Terray also points out, Marx and Engels were critical of any attempts to apply Darwinist evolutionary theory direct to human society. Marx wrote, in 1870, that "to see history up to the present as a class struggle is enough to demonstrate the superficial nature of an approach that seeks to make this history into an almost undifferentiated 'struggle or life'." Instead Terray argues that Morgan's success (and the support from Marx and Engels for his work) arises out of Morgan's attempt "to construct a theory of that history, that is, a syustem of concepts to make it possible to think it out scientifically".

In Terray's words, Morgan's theory of history is this: "human experience is produced by the interaction of three elements: man's primary needs, the primary germs of through, and natural logic". Crucial to this, and "the determinant sphere" for Morgan are the "arts of subsistence". Morgan says:

Mankind are the only beings who may be said to have gained an absolute control over the production of food, which at the outset they did not possess above other animals. Without enlarging the basis of susbsistence, mankind could not have propagated themselves into other areas...It is accordingly probable that the great epochs of human progress have been identified... with the enlragement of the sources of subsistence".

Marx and Engels would, of course, have a much more detailed exploration of how humans interact with nature, themselves and produce history. The development of the forces of production and the consequent transformation of social relations are central to their historical materialism. But it is Morgan's attempt to do this, and his recognition that ideas must connect to material reality to produce the necessities for survival, that would make his work so influential.

It's a surprisingly accessible work from Terray. But at times it seems to revel in obscurity. It is possible to work out why he means by "the transition from the punaluan family to the syndyasmian was not adequate to overturn the Turanian system of consanguinity". But it takes some work with a dictionary and a pencil.

Part two of the book is an engagement by Emmanuel Terray with the work of Claude Meillassoux, an anthropologist who trapplied historical materialism to a strudy of a "primative" society, in this case the Guro people of the Ivory Coast, a society in transition under the influence of colonialism. He begins by discussing the Marxist concept of "mode of production" and its relevance here as the Guro have a combination of different economic systems of production. Here I found Terray somewhat mechanical in his approach:

It should be possible to discover the dominant socioeconomic formations through the study of their instruments of labour and hence to construct a preliminary hypothesis as to the nature of the mode or modes of production concerned. It would then be possible to analyze the concrete social formations found in the field by the ethnologist and to begin to reconstruct the relations of production of which these structres are one "realisation".

I've always been a little wary of simply generalising from the instruments of labour to existing, contemporary, "social formations" and reading that backward into history. Drawing on Meillassoux's work, Terray argues that the Guro have a combination of "two modes of production". The two identified are a "tribal-village" system with "all the men of the group" acting as authority, and a lineage system whereby the "means of production are owned collectively but a single individual holds them on behalf of the group". These two areas differing in "where these modes of production" operate according to Terray. The former in "hunting with nets" the later in "agriculture, fishing, gathering" etc. The different requirements of the production producing different social relations etc. Terray continues to celebrate how Meillassoux shows the "interplay between kinship and relations and relations of production" vary and change. Here the detail of Terray's anthropology lost me, but he appears to be arguing that the socioeconomic formation of the Guro is shaped by the constant changing of genelogical kinship resting on an economic base:

Concerned to kepp the economic base as the determinant phase of the overall structure, [Meillassoux] gives a brilliant demonstation of the way in which the lineage system in the GUro socioeconomic formation derives from a transformation of genealogical kinship relations, a transformation determined and shaped by the requirements of production.

Why does this matter? Here we quote Terray again:

It appears that the absence of the exploitation of labor is the second necessary condition for kinship to act as an element in the relaisation of the mode of production. This brings us back by another route to the thesis supported by Morgan and Engels in the first applications of historical materialism to ethnolog: the domination of kinship relations in the social organisation is incompatible with the exploitation of labor and the existence of class relations.

Terray then returns to Marx to explore how the domination of one mode of production over another shapes the nature of society itself.

Terray's second article in this book is an attempt to explore core ideas of Marxism around modes of production and consider how successful the best proponent of the historical materialist approach has been. Terray concludes that Meillassoux has made important steps forward, which could ensure that "social anthropology becomes a particular section of historical metarialism devoted to socioeconomic formations" without capitalism. It is also clear that Terray's own engagement with this material opened up new vistas for future researchers, helping transform anthropology.

Marxism and "Primitive" societies is as the title suggests, in some ways very dated. For a none specialist it was, in places hard work. But it was also readable and engaging, and while I was lost in some of the closer arguments about "kinships" and "lineage", I gained a lot from seeing how Terray made his argument.

Sunday, August 02, 2026

Leon Trotsky - Fascism, Stalinism & the United Front

In the early 1930s, as fascism in Germany grew from strength to strength, the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote a series of pamphlets and articles to explain the nature of fascism and to argue for a working class strategy that could defeat it. These articles, several of the most important of which are collected here, remain some of the best studies of German fascism and Hitler's rise to power. They remain crucial reads today for those trying to understand contemporary fascism - not because the situation is identical, but because Trotsky's method is to place the far-right into the political and economic context.

That said, the essays collected here, contain a great deal of insight, strategy and tactics, that can help us understand how to defeat the far-right and fascism today. Key to this, as Trotsky understood in the 1930s, was mobilising the largest number of workers in militant and mass opposition to the fascists. This required the use of the United Front tactic, a strategy developed in the revolutionary circumstances of 1917 by the Bolsheviks, and adopted by the early Communist International. It required the revolutionary left to build a strategic alliance with forces and workers' organisations to the right of them in order to shape a mass movement. The potential, as Trotsky repeatedly notes, was there but the principle barrier to such unity was the ultra-left position of the German Communist Party (KPD). The KPD argued, following the lead of the now Stalinised Comintern, that the Social Democrats were no better than the fascists. Indeed, at times they made it clear they thought that the Social Democrats and the millions of German workers' who supported and voted for them were worse than the Nazis.

This positioning was tragic. It cut the revolutionary left off from wider workers' forces. This fundamentally weakened the anti-fascist movement and it also undermined the ability of the KPD to build the revolutionary left. Throughout these essays there is a growing sense of urgency from Trotsky as he desperately argues for a different course.

In 1930 he writes:

If the Communist Party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair. When revolutionary hope embraces the whole proletarian mass, it inevitably pulls behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie.

But the opposite is also true. Trotsky continues:

The election revealed... counter-revolutionary despair embraced the petty bourgeois mass with such a force that it drew behind it many sections of the proletariat.

Later he points out that:

those workers who remain with Social Democracy, as well as those who voted this time for the National Socialists, did do not out of simple ignorance, not because they awakened only yesterday, not because they have as yet had no chance to know what the Communist Party is, but because they have no faith, on the basis of their own experience in the recent years.

The mistakes of the KPD in the revolutionary era of the early 1920s were one thing, but a bigger problem was the wrong-headed approach to the Social Democrats. One problem of course, was the failure to build unity also undermined the ability of the KPD to build the sort of struggles that could have undermined some of the political and economic base of the Nazi's support.

The belief that the SPD were as bad as the fascists meant that the KPD wasn't able to launch the sort of industrial strategy that could have raised the confidence of the working class and transformed the situation. In his 1932 article, The Only Road, Trotsky points out that it is precisely the chaos of capitalism itself that is leading the capitalists towards seeing fascism as a solution. That requires a clearer revolutionary strategy from the KPD, one that was sorely lacking:

If the economic evils of our epoch, in the last analysis, result from the fact that the productive forces of humanity are incompatible with private ownership of the means of production as well as with national boundaries, German capitalism is goring through the severest convulsions just because it is the most modern, most advanced, and most dynamic capitalism on the continent of Europe.

He continues a few pages later:

The petty bourgeoisie must acquire faith in the ability of the proletariat to lead society onto a new road. The proletariat can inspire this faith only by its strength, by the firmness of its actions, by a skilful offensive against the enemy, by the success of its revolutionary policy.

The barrier to this was, in the first instance, the fact that the Soviet Union's isolation meant that country was no longer led by revolutionaries, but by a "national-opportunistic bureaucracy, which does not believe in world revolution". This is the "misfortune" for the whole proletariat.

Many of these essays are available elsewhere, and some of them have been collected in different collections. One thing that stands out from this edition from Bookmarks in Britain is a very useful framing essay by Steve Wright, and contextual introductions to each year by Chris Harman. This new edition of Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front also benefits from an excellent essay by British socialist and anti-fascist organiser Samira Ali, who brings Trotsky's analysis of fascism up to date. As she says, these articles "endure because of their theoretical clarity and their strategic questions remain profoundly contemporary".

In Britain we live in the most dangerous times since Trotsky was writing. If the specifics of fascist organisations today are different, as Samira Ali says, we "return to Trotsky['s writings]... not because they offer a ready-made template for understanding fascism today, but because they provide something more important than historical analogy. They provide a method: analyse fascism concretely, identify the forces that can stop it, and argue for forms of working class unity before the decisive moment has passed."

As such this book is one for our dangerous times.

George Clare - Berlin Days: 1946-1947

In 1938 George Clare, then aged 17 and an Austrian Jew, fled Vienna where he had grown up to escape the Nazi annexation of the country. Clare's parents would eventually die in the Holocaust, but in those pre-war years they initially ended up in Berlin where they expected to get passes to travel to France. Somewhat surprisingly, given the political situation, Clare fell in love with Berlin. Though he eventually made it to England and spent the war there, when he eventually was called up after the war he made it back to Berlin where he began playing a key diplomatic and legal role in the denazification process that the Allies imposed on the population of defeated Germany.

Berlin Days is the second part of Clare's autobiography. The first covers his youth in Austria and the fate of his family. This is a book that covers Clare's time in Berlin, a short period but one that was foundational for European geopolitics and Clare himself. While the book looks at the denazification process and the problems that the Allied authorities faced, it is also Clare's coming to terms with what Nazism meant and how the people of Germany came to follow Hitler. In no small part it is also Clare's reckoning with the deaths of his parents in Nazi concentration camps.

Some of the most interesting, and poignant, parts of the book occur when Clare follows up on people who his family knew from before the war, or does similar on behalf of friends back home. His own family members, being Jews, have simply vanished. Clare's friends fiancee have survived, clearly having suffered through the war, and seek his support to navigate labyrinthine military beauracracy in order to get permission to work. On his arrival there's a certain naivete to Clare as he tends to see the good in people. Later he becomes more cynical as he experiences various former Nazis trying to escape the net or hide their backgrounds.

Alongside other military officers Clare eventually gets to discuss the fates of hundreds of Germans. Those wanting to take on particular jobs, in particular jounralists or actors, have to demonstrate that they hadn't been a member of the Nazi party. This is made more complicated by the different regulations for the Soviet, French, British and American sectors. The division of Berlin adds confusion when, as in the case of the famous condutor Furtwangler, one or other side (in this case the Soviets) want to use them for their own ends. On occasion Clare and his colleagues expose someone who has hidden an appalling past. They, after all, have all the Nazi documents that have escaped destruction.

Unfortunately Clare's rather plodding style doesn't suit the material and the anecdotes are often lost in the material. It's hard to get a wider picture of Berlin in these crucial period, as Clare's focus is so narrow on the immediate bureacracy he experienced. That's not to say there's nothing of interest. For instance Clare meets (in 1946 and again towards the end of her lifetime), Else Bongers the wife oif the Bauhaus architect and socialist, Richard Paulick. Bongers helps get Paulick out of Germany immediately after the Nazis take power, saving his life. But she remains. But this interesting story is all too brief. The real problem perhaps is that too many actual Nazis were helped out by the various administrations when they had knowledge and skills that were needed.

In his attempts to understand the Nazis and the Germans, Clare is similarly disappointing. He tends to see Hitler as having a unique ability at a time of great Nationalism, to sway millions. There is no doubt truth in this, but Clare fails to grasp why fascism was so effective at destroying political opposition. That said Clare, who was a leftist at the time, does understand that the failure of unity between the Communists and Socialists was crucial to Hitler's breakthrough. He does not, however, not the systematic violence that was used to stop any opposition.

With its over focus on the bureacracy this book will probably interest specialists more than the casual reader.

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