1938: Hitler’s Gamble
“A chilling examination of a critical year in European history.”
Kirkus
“Adolf Hitler was a natural gambler, and this book graphically describes the critical year of 1938 when his winning streak took off….Harrowing.”
Edinburgh Evening News
“A powerful, disturbing and invaluable analysis of the events in 1938 that enabled Hitler to unleash the full force of his insanity and destruction on the world.”
Shelf Awareness
“It would be difficult to attribute Hitler’s ascent to any single event, but historian Giles MacDonogh makes a convincing case that 1938 is the crucial year to understanding his reign and brutal hold on power.”
The Daily Beast
“This is not a traditional history based on dry archival sources or details about who said or did what and when… Interesting and easy to read, this is recommended for avid general readers of World War II history.”
Library Journal
“There’s no real answer to MacDonogh’s ‘What if?’ question, but one thing is clear: Hitler’s extremism grew steadily stronger each time the rest of the world feigned blindness and looked the other way.”
New York Post
‘… einem Wertvollen Dokument der Zeitgeschichte.’ Gregor Auenhammer.
Der Standard(Austria)
"Giles MacDonogh has repeatedly shown himself to be in the front rank of British scholars of German history. The depth of his human understanding, the judiciousness of his pickings from source material and the quality of his writing make this a book at once gripping and grave."
Graham Stewart, The Spectator.
"MacDonogh’s account of the Anschluss and its aftermath is a masterpiece of extreme emotion held in check. His level tone as he reels off appalling atrocities and such chilling statistics as the steadily rising suicide rate among Jews trapped in Vienna somehow makes the tragedy of the destruction of a whole community even more telling."
"Nigel Jones, Sunday Telegraph"
"… excellent and stimulating…"
Robert Low, Jewish Chronicle
"…this is a fine book. Its vignettes and set pieces are excellent and its author has not lost his eye for the telling detail or anecdote. It ably conveys the growing desperation and alarm felt by many that year, as Germany began to flex its muscles internationally and stepped up the persecution of its perceived enemies."
Roger Moorhouse, BBC History
"…compelling…"
Nick Rennison, Sunday Times
After the Reich
“What makes MacDonogh's book so effective is the sheer breadth of his vision, including the full panoply of German victimization together in a single volume. He examines the brutality perpetrated against the Germans and the suffering that they endured up close and personal. The devil of occupation is in its details, and these he provides in colorful prose.”
Norman Naimark, The Weekly Standard, USA
“[MacDonogh] has brought new attention to Britain’s and America’s own questionable records during the occupation . . . Ending his story on the threshold of a new, though divided, Germany, MacDonogh gives an account of tragic human experience, all too little known, in the words of those who lived through it. It is not only a fascinating story but a unique and valuable historical document.”
New York Review of Books
“In AFTER THE REICH, Giles MacDonogh, a British author of several books about German history, chronicles the final weeks of the war and the occupation that followed. His ambitious mission: to offer a comprehensive, unsparing account of what happened to the German people when the tables were turned. MacDonogh works to assemble a massive indictment of the victors, and his array of detail and individual stories is both impressive and exhausting.”
Washington Post Book World
“Americans' image of the end of World War II in Europe is of GIs parading on happy streets. But that was not the case in Germany, as author Giles MacDonogh demonstrates in AFTER THE REICH, a history of the conquest and occupation of the Reich, including what is now Austria... This is a sometimes violent and often disturbing history that prods the reader to think about the choices of conquerors.”
Seattle Times
“In his meticulously researched book AFTER THE REICH, British-born Giles MacDonogh, an expert in German history, offers a different view of this ‘noble’ war's aftermath. With unsparing detail and ample documentation, he chronicles the events after the victory in Europe in May 1945 to the Berlin airlift four years later, and exposes the slippery slope of the moral high ground many of us believed the Allies possessed during those years.”
Boston Globe
“One cannot read AFTER THE REICH without thinking of the phrase ‘winning the war but losing the peace’ as the book draws a line from the occupation directly to the division of Berlin and the Cold War that gripped much of the world and informed foreign relations for the next 60 years. Scars across Europe from the post-World War II era remain, and MacDonogh has picked the scab at a time of modern war and occupation when, perhaps, the world most needs to examine an old wound.”
Boston Globe
“Mass deportations, murder, and brutalization of helpless noncombatants--these are the crimes one readily associates with Hitler's minions as they ravaged their way across Europe. But Macdonogh, a journalist with particular expertise in German history, convincingly illustrates that this was the fate of millions of German-speaking civilians in the period from the fall of Vienna to the Soviets to the Berlin airlift . . . Given the horrors visited upon Europe by the Nazis, one might be tempted to consider these atrocities as just retribution. However, Macdonogh's eloquent account of the suffering of these people is, hopefully, able to evoke strong feelings of both revulsion and compassion from most readers.”
ALA Booklist
“This absorbing study of the Allied occupation of Germany and Austria from 1945 to 1949 shows that the end of WWII by no means ended the suffering. A vengeful Red Army visited on German women an ordeal of mass rape, while looting the Soviet occupation zone of almost everything of value . . . The result is a sobering view of how vengeance stained Allied victory.”
Publishers Weekly
“Giles MacDonogh's shocking new book gives a very different and long overdue alternative view--and all the more sobering for being written in a style that betrays no hint of the author's anger at the appalling atrocities he relates . . . [A] superb book written by a sympathetic writer in perfect control of his often dreadful material. Overall, MacDonogh has told a story that had to be told and told it very well. The book teaches, in fact, an old and classic lesson: it is better not to start wars, but it is fatal to lose them.”
History Today
“Throughout time it has been the victor who has written history, but here historian MacDonogh examines the darker side of the Allied occupation of defeated Germany . . . Of interest to students of modern Europe, complementing W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (2003) and other studies of history from the point of view of the vanquished.”
Kirkus Reviews
“MacDonogh has written a grueling but important book. This unhappy story has long been cloaked in silence since telling it suited no one. Not the Allies, because it placed them near the moral nadir of the Nazis; nor the Germans, because they did not wish to be accused of whitewashing Hitler by highlighting what was, by any standard, a war crime. Giles MacDonogh has told a very inconvenient truth.”
Nigel Jones, Sunday Telegraph
“VE Day on May 8, 1945 mocked the subsequent condition of Europe. As crowds in London, Paris and New York celebrated the declaration of peace, much more misery and death lay ahead. Two, perhaps three million Germans perished in the years that followed: in captivity; from hunger and casual violence; and above all, during the expulsions of ethnic Germans from the east, which the western Allies had agreed with the Russians before hostilities ended.
Giles MacDonogh's book chronicles this saga from the liberation of Vienna to the 1948 Berlin Airlift and 1949 formation of Konrad Adenauer's government in Bonn. It makes grimmer reading than most war stories, because there is little redemptive courage or virtue. Here is a catalogue of pillage, rape, starvation, inhumanity and suffering on a titanic scale…. [AFTER THE REICH] book brings together many stories that deserve to be much better known in the West.”
Max Hastings, Sunday Times
“Giles MacDonogh's AFTER THE REICH is important and timely. He has a profound understanding of Germany, which he communicates in a humane and engaging style. Though he is sensitive to the sufferings of the Germans after the war, he never loses sight of the fact that this was an occupation that the Western powers got right. After the Reich is a remarkable book, with a rich cast of characters, and it has oblique relevance to our own problems in the wider world.”
Michael Burleigh, author of The Third Reich: A New History and Sacred Causes
A Good German
“A well-researched, well-written and important book.”
Geoffrey Hodgson, Independent
“This is a hair-raising, risk-filled and extraordinary tale thrillingly told by MacDonogh.”
Robert Carver, the Listener
“We may be grateful for this very timely book.”
The Bishop of Ely, Church Times
“Hier gehen Praezision und lebhafte Darstellung Hand in Hand.” (Here precision and lively description go hand in hand).
Lieva Reunes, “Politisches Buch” Die Zeit
“I am deep in your book - fascinated as you may, or may not imagine.”
A. L. Rowse
Prussia, The Perversion of an Idea
“Giles MacDonogh is a persuasive writer; both the virtues and weaknesses of Prussian life come vividly to life in his pages.”
Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph
“Anyone who enters into the spirit of this book will find it difficult to emerge with his prejudices about Prussia and Prussians intact.”
Anne Applebaum, Literary Review
“Elegant”
Harold James, the Times
“Few Germans have managed to approach Prussia in such a refreshing, entertaining and impartial style.”
Tatjana Gräfin Dönhoff, the European
Berlin, A Portrait of its History, Architecture and Society
“A rich book, packed with information, understanding and enthusiasm, stuffed with wonderful tales well told and suffused by prodigious reading (nearly all in German sources).”
Anne Tusa, Daily Telegraph
“MacDonogh’s historical expertise, notably over the appalling deeds of the Nazis in Berlin, [which] results in the most honest appraisal this ever-changing city can hope for at yet another decisive moment in its troubled history.”
James Woodall, the Times
It[contains] “a great deal of fascinating information, mostly about aspects of popular or daily life ignored by more traditional histories.”
Publishers Weekly
Frederick the Great
“[MacDonogh’s] portrait is given sparkle by his own laconic wit, on a par with his subject’s, and depth by his profound physical sense and knowledge of the little country which has shaped all our lives.”
Grey Gowrie, Daily Telegraph
“Stylishly written and rich in detail, this biography offers the most rounded portrait of Frederick the Great yet to appear in English.”
John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph
“Frederick the Great presents a wonderful subject for a biographer and Giles MacDonogh certainly seizes his opportunity with both hands. He has immersed himself in Frederick’s voluminous works and his even more extensive correspondence, emerging with the most convincing personal portrait available in any language.”
Tim Blanning - Professor of Modern European History at Cambridge, the Financial Times
“It was a great reign, and in Giles MacDonogh it has found a great biographer.”
Andrew Roberts, the Mail on Sunday
“Book of the Week” in The Week and a London Best Seller and recommended summer reading in the Sunday Times
“MacDonogh allows the reader to feel, vicariously, the thrill of being in Frederick’s company and to regard the many dimensions of this remarkable man”
Andrew Whiteside, the Wall Street Journal
“His wide-ranging and often compelling portrait [where] all the varied facets of this complex man are examined. While the historical research is excellent, MacDonogh employs his journalistic training to eloquently convey the conflicts and immense personal dynamism that lay behind his subject’s ambitions and accomplishments. Both general readers and those with a strong background in European history will find great value in this outstanding biography.”
Booklist
The Last Kaiser
“Giles MacDonogh is scrupulously fair. He stresses the constraints surrounding the Kaiser and the extent to which others made decisions for which he was blamed.”
Richard Vinen, the Financial Times
“Highly readable, well-paced narrative.”
Richard Overy, Sunday Telegraph
“Compelling”
The Sunday Times
Recommended “to anyone who still believes the myths that have formed the Anglo-American view of the last Kaiser.”
The Washington Times
“Historian MacDonogh, in a thorough and incisive treatment, tackles [the] issues with both aplomb and fairness.”
Booklist
“A gripping narrative about a flawed, but ultimately pitiable king.”
Kirkus Reviews
A Palate in Revolution - Grimod de La Reynière and the Almanach des Gourmands
“...may be my favourite book of the decade”.
Anthony Blond, Spectator
“...the most delightful surprise of the season - a succinct biography and first English translation of selected writing from an extraordinary and prodigious gourmand who lived through the French Revolution to a respectable old age of increasingly bizarre banquets.”
Jeremy Round, Independent
“...witty and informative and [Giles MacDonogh] wears his erudition with commendable lightness.”
David Profumo, Sunday Times
Brillat-Savarin, The Judge and His Stomach
“In this biography... Giles MacDonogh explores with elegance and scholarship the world of revolutionaries and gourmets as the culinary achievements of the reign of Louis XV were brought back into circulation through new Paris restaurants.”
Robin Smyth, Observer
“...an excellent, absorbing and very amusing book and for the likes of myself, highly educative - also very well written.”
Jennifer Paterson, Literary Review
“MacDonogh has done a superb job in placing Brillat-Savarin in his complicated times.”
Paul Pickering, Sunday Times
Giles MacDonogh’s Brillat-Savarin is a cascade of freshness and originality; it is deeply researched and brilliantly written. It is a masterly book and it lingers on the memory like a physical pleasure.”
Peter Levi, Spectator |
