★★★★★ 3
Impressive sources, sophomoric writing.
Format: Kindle
Should everyone read this book? Certainly. But the writing is too poor for me to offer an enthusiastic four or five star recommendation. I'm surprised an editor did not clean this up so that the book could live up to its eye-opening content.
This already short book has quite a lot of distracting, repetitive padding. Symbolic of this is the use of the phrase "of course" - it appears thirty times.
More repetition appears in the author's needless (and, I would say, presumptuous) dwelling on the reader's emotional reactions to the content of the book: the idea that America might have influenced the Nazis is "too awful to contemplate," and "is sure to seem distressing," and "hard to digest," and "no one wants to imagine" it, and "none of this is entirely easy to talk about," and "it is hard to look coolly on the question," and "it is hard to admit," and "no one wants to be perceived as relativizing," and "no non-Germans want their country to be accused," and "it is hard to overcome our sense that..." and "painful though it may be for us to admit..." and "awful it may be to contemplate," and "the story of American influence...is certainly depressing," and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, "To be sure, we must keep our composure..."
This repetition gets exhausting in a single 56-word sentence invoking the phrases "true nefandum...abyss of unexampled modern horror...sui generis radical evil...a sort of dark star."
More padding appears in the author's concern with arguing against weak positions: "We can, and should, reject the sort of simple-minded anti-Americanism..." "It would be a mistake to draw overblown conclusions..." Well, yes, simple-minded anything is to be rejected, as are overblown conclusions about anything. But that doesn't stop the author from presenting repetitive arguments.
Additional filler that an editor should have excised is in the form of these phrases, which read like a student trying to hit a required word count in a term paper: "It is important to note that..." "In particular it is essential to emphasize..." "We must bear that fact in mind..." "It is an unpleasant truth that..." "Worthy of attention above all is..." "It is particularly noteworthy that..." "Sahm is a particularly noteworthy author..."
Finally, the author descends into a kind of bullying that indicates a lack of confidence in his own presentation: "Our literature has taken a crass interpretative track." "It is a major interpretative fallacy on the part of all these scholars..."It would be foolish and craven to minimize Nazi interest in what American law represented." "It is essential to reject once and for all the proposition that American law could not have been of interest to the Nazis." "It is simply nonsense to claim..." "Once we dispose of that dubious claim..." "There can be no justification for ignoring the evidence..." "Only a naive and pedestrian understanding of law - only a dogged refusal to face facts..." An editor should have deleted these kinds of phrases and just let the content - the documenting of Nazi interest in America law - speak for itself.
With all this rhetorical padding, the book is overpriced. Nevertheless it has value as a kind of annotated bibliography.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2017
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