I blame Christopher Caldwell, I really do. A few years ago, Caldwell dropped a bunker-buster of a negative review on Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.
R.J.B. Bosworth’s Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 is an intermittently interesting but deeply, deeply flawed social history of — well just what it says, life under Mussolini’s dictatorship.
If works of history can ever be described as “heroic,” then surely Richard Evans’ exhaustive and meticulous Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial meets the test.
In The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West has produced an ambitious, sophisticated, and closely argued case that the ills of American culture can be traced to a society-wide revulsion from the obligations and responsibilities of adulthood.