REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

   

WILLIAM L. SHIRER – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 17 October 1960. TV adaptation: ABC, 1968, consisting of a one-hour episode aired each night over three nights.

   I’m anticipating here.

   See August is the end of Summer, and that got me to thinking of September. Which is the month before October. (Check your calendars.) Which is the month I spend reading scary books and watching old monster movies.

   And that got me thinking about an Autumn a few years back, when I led into it….

         (Cue harp.)

   …by reading William L. Shirer’s classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich ,  a real mega-book when it first came out – I remember it was serialized in Life, there were TV shows, bubble-gum cards, tie-in comics, etc. – and it’s easy to see why: More’n fifteen hundred pages and scarcely a clunker in the bunch. Well, I admit to skimming over some of the background on Hitler’s grandparents, but by and mostly this is a compulsive page-turner, even if the title gives away the ending.

   What’s Halloween-scariest, though, is the first third, describing Hitler’s rise to power: how he subtly smeared his rivals with racist tactics, arranged to have opposing parties disenfranchised, convinced Parliament to give up its oversight powers, and the people to abridge their civil liberties in the name of National Security; filled the media with scare stories about threats from Poland and Czechoslovakia… one either sees the parallels or never will, but what impressed me is that you and I read about these antics and say, “I don’t wanna do that stuff if Hitler did it,” but apparently some people read this and say, “Hot dang! That’s slicker’n a toad in a out-house! I gotta try that….

   I guess Real Life gets scary too.