Eat any good books lately?

[benji]

Coincidentally, the two that posted as bigger images are easily the two best of these. 

Takeover's jacket, intro and ending all invoke the then upcoming 2024 election and Trump, even as the rest of the book makes quite clear that Weimar Germany was nothing like current America. My actual complaint, rather than amusement like that, is that the author never asks or attempts to explain why Hindenburg ultimately caved after spending so much time on how far he was the only one in the conservative camp who refused to deal with Hitler. We don't even get the common "they thought they could control him" explanation. I think this is a disservice because Hitler's appointment ultimately was not the "takeover" it was when the entire system acquiesced to the Enabling Act. The book stops at Hitler being sworn in as Chancellor. This matters because the Enabling Act is when everyone else deliberately gave up their checks on the Chancellor. The book touches on Hindenburg's desire to retire and how he hated politics, but it doesn't follow this through to why he ultimately gave in to Hitler and was willing to sign the Enabling Act: he had done his time trying to hold together the Republic, he was too old and if everybody else was getting insane he wasn't going to stop them anymore. This seems pretty relevant if your goal, as stated as the purpose of the book, is to learn from the past so we can prevent a future Hitler. Don't base the entire survival of your system around a guy 20 years past life expectancy! (An error many societies have made throughout history.)