Hitler on Amazon – Telegraph Blogs

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Ceri Radford

Ceri Radford is Assistant Comment Editor of the Telegraph.

Hitler on Amazon

Over lunch, I looked up Mein Kampf on Amazon.


Wonder if the real Hitler used to read in the bath…

It's not that eating an egg and cress sandwich automatically triggers thoughts of the FÃ¼hrer, but the book came up in conversation for some odd tangential reason and I found myself wondering how it fared in theÂ customer review section.

The findings were a touch surprising. First up, Adolf is something of a literary hit, with an average 4 star rating (that's half a star better than last year's Booker prize winner, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai).

A couple of theÂ reviews brand Hitler's work 'vile,' but the predominant tone isn't exactly shock and loathing. Here are a few extracts:

Excellent read, but it's a book of 2 halves. The very good and obviously the very bad. Part 1 great, Part 2 a nightmare to read as he talks about the ins and outs of the Political Party. But I would have paid the full price for just the 1st chapter alone. I was surprised by some of his views on life and his understanding of people. The first part make you view the world differently, A very interesting book. Eye opening!

Reading that book shows how easy it seems for a clever man to answer many big society issues in a very clever and realistic way. It shows that any issue can be addressed and solved.

Surprisingly well written by a surprisingly clever man. I didn't know what to expect, but it certainly wasn't this. There is such a lot that you cannot help but agree with, and also draw parallels with today's decadent world.


And finally, you have to admire the unflinching commitment to balanced reviewing in this one:

For:
Intriguing
Some truth in there
Against:
Vile racism, nationalism and extremism
Very poorly written
Too long for the number of ideas, leading to too much repetition
Ideas that are wrong

I can't exactly weigh in with my own opinion as I've never readÂ Mein KampfÂ - despite a sense of morbid fascination and a token nod towards the duty to learn about mistakes of past etc etc, it's not top of my reading list.

And God only knows what Amazon now thinks should be. My 'recently viewed' section is alarming I browsed What's left? How liberals lost their way, by Nick Cohen, which is fairly self-explanatory, then Jasvinder Sanghera's autobiography Shame, an account of a traumatic upbringing in a British sikh community, then, finally, Mein Kampf.

It looks like an swift trajectory from disenchantment with liberalism to curiosity about the pitfalls of multiculturalism to a sudden interest in the ideals of Mr A Hitler. Yikes. I'd better order myself some Noam Chomsky before there's a knock at my door.

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