Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power

by Andrew Nagorski

Overview

World War II historian Andrew Nagorski recounts Adolf Hitler’s rise to and consolidation of power, drawing on countless firsthand reports, letters, and diaries that narrate the creation of the Third Reich.

“Hitlerland is a bit of a guilty pleasure. Reading about the Nazis is not supposed to be fun, but Nagorski manages to make it so. Readers new to this story will find it fascinating” (The Washington Post).

Hitler’s rise to power, Germany’s march to the abyss, as seen through the eyes of Americans—diplomats, military officers, journalists, expats, visiting authors, Olympic athletes—who watched horrified and up close. “Engaging if chilling...a broader look at Americans who had a ringside seat to Hitler’s rise” (USA TODAY), Hitlerland offers a gripping narrative full of surprising twists—and a startlingly fresh perspective on this heavily dissected era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439191019
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	03/19/2013
Pages:	385
Sales rank:	327,594
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Andrew Nagorski served as Newsweek’s bureau chief in Hong Kong, Moscow, Rome, Bonn, Warsaw, and Berlin. He is the author of seven previous critically acclaimed books, including Hitlerland and The Nazi Hunters. He has also written for countless publications. Visit him at AndrewNagorski.com.

Read an Excerpt

Hitlerland

Of all the Americans who reported from Germany between World War I and World War II, no one was quite as well prepared for the assignment as Sigrid Schultz. Born in Chicago in 1893 to parents who had come from Norway, she spent most of her youth, starting at age eight, in Europe. Her father was a successful portrait painter who made Paris his base, which meant Sigrid attended French schools. When he received an assignment to paint the portrait of the king and queen of Württemberg, she also attended German schools for several months, equipping her not only with the language but also with early insights into local attitudes.

“Few foreign painters were invited to German courts in those days and the other little girls tried to be nice,” she recalled. “But it was clear that to be non-German was a deficiency. Any foreigner who failed to be dazzled and humbled by German Kultur or efficiency was, at best, an object of pity.”

Schultz studied international law at the Sorbonne and then moved to Berlin with her parents. There, she witnessed World War I from the losing side. Once the United States entered the war in 1917, she and her parents had to report every day to the police as “enemy aliens,” but she was able to continue her studies, taking courses at Berlin University. In the aftermath of that conflict, the Chicago Tribune hired her to work with its Berlin correspondent Richard Henry Little, who was impressed with her language skills. But from the moment she started her new job in early 1919, she demonstrated her reporting skills as well, teaming up with Little on assignments.

Together, Schultz and Little interviewed dozens of German officers to get a sense of their mood in the wake of Germany’s defeat. Most were bitter, but none more so than “a sour, disagreeable little man in navy blue, whose name was Raeder,” Schultz wrote. The German officer told the two reporters: “You Americans need not feel proud of yourselves. Within twenty-five years at the latest, your country and my country will be at war again. And this time we shall win, because we will be better prepared than you will be.”

The Americans didn’t take offense—quite the contrary. “I well remember how, on that day in 1919, we felt sorry for vengeful little Raeder,” Schultz noted. “He was taking defeat so hard. He was, we felt, simply consuming himself with hatred.”

Schultz became the Chicago Tribune’s chief correspondent for Central Europe in 1926, and she remained based in Berlin until 1941, impressing successive waves of the otherwise almost all-male American press corps with her knowledge of Germany and her tenaciousness in chasing down stories. Looking back at her experiences in her book Germany Will Try It Again, written and published during World War II, she argued that Raeder’s bitterness was widely shared by his countrymen, along with his eagerness to avenge their defeat in the previous global conflagration.

By that point, of course, she knew where this bitterness had led, and the question arises whether some of her descriptions were colored by hindsight. But in the case of her recollection of the interview with Raeder, it appears that she only added a final flourish to emphasize the accuracy of his prediction: “When, almost twenty-two years later, Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States, the man commanding the German Navy was Grand Admiral Dr. Erich Raeder.”

*   *   *

Much has been written about Americans in France and Great Britain during the interwar period, and even a fair amount about Americans in the Soviet Union. But, for a variety of reasons, the Americans who lived, worked or traveled in Germany at the time when Hitler was coming to power and then forged the Third Reich haven’t attracted anything like that level of attention—including Schultz and many of her colleagues. In fact, they are often forgotten. Or, like diplomat George Kennan, they may be remembered, but not for their German experiences; the German chapter in their lives was eclipsed by other parts of their biographies that made them famous—in Kennan’s case, as the architect of the containment policy that successive postwar presidents pursued in dealing with the Soviet Union.

As a result, Americans often have the impression that the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the subsequent rush to terror and war took place in a strange, isolated country. Few of them pause to ask who were the Americans there who witnessed these events firsthand, how they perceived and reported them either as part of their jobs or simply as curious visitors, and what kind of impact their accounts had on their countrymen’s views of Germany at the time.

Today, it’s conventional wisdom that Hitler’s intentions were perfectly clear from the outset and that his policies could only result in World War II and the Holocaust. Most people find it hard to imagine that in the 1920s and right through the 1930s, American reporters, diplomats, entertainers, sociologists, students and others living in or passing through Germany wouldn’t have all instantly seen and understood what was happening before their eyes. After all, they had ringside seats, providing them with an unparalleled view of the most dramatic story of the twentieth century. Several of them not only observed Hitler from afar, but met and spoke to him, both when he was still a local agitator in Munich and then the all-powerful dictator in Berlin. To them, he wasn’t some abstract embodiment of evil but a real-life politician. Some Americans tried to take his measure very early, while others did so once he was in power. And even those who didn’t have those opportunities witnessed the consequences of his actions.

Yet their readings of what was happening in Germany, and what Hitler represented, varied greatly. There were those who met Hitler and recognized he represented almost a primeval force and possessed an uncanny ability to tap into the emotions and anger of the German people, and those who dismissed him as a clownish figure who would vanish from the political scene as quickly as he had appeared. There were those who, at least initially, viewed him and his movement sympathetically or even embraced it, and those whose instinctive misgivings quickly gave way to full-scale alarm, recognizing that he was a threat not only to Germany but also to the world.

It wasn’t just Americans who didn’t know what to make of Hitler or who hadn’t really examined what passed for his worldview. Otto Strasser, an early follower of Hitler who later broke with him and escaped from Germany, recalled a dinner with several top Nazi officials at the 1927 Party Congress in Nuremberg. When it became apparent no one had read Hitler’s autobiographical screed Mein Kampf in its entirety, they agreed that they would ask anyone who joined them if he had done so—and stick that person with the bill. “Nobody had read Mein Kampf, so everyone had to pay his own bill,” Strasser reported.

The unfolding of history only looks inevitable in retrospect, and the judgments of the Americans who were witnessing these events unfold were based on a variety of factors: their predispositions, the different slices of reality that they observed and whether at times they saw only what they wanted to see, whatever the signals to the contrary. Schultz chose to highlight Raeder’s comments in 1919 to bolster her thesis later, once the United States and Germany were at war again, that Hitler’s movement was the logical outcome of the hate fomented by the country’s defeat in the previous war. But other Americans dwelled on their warm reception in the aftermath of World War I, and wanted to believe that the toll of that conflict had been so high that it had served as a decisive object lesson. Edgar Ansel Mowrer, the Berlin correspondent for the rival Chicago paper, the Daily News, recalled that in the 1920s “most Americans in Germany nourished a legitimate hope that Germany’s defeat, humiliation, inflation and internal disorders had brought home to most citizens the folly of again seeking European hegemony.”

While correspondents like Schultz and Mowrer, and diplomats like Kennan and several of his colleagues, were hardly innocents abroad—they had studied and worked elsewhere in Europe—many of the Americans who were in Germany in this period were both very young and very inexperienced. This, of course, colored their perceptions and influenced their reactions. They were alternately charmed, shocked and mesmerized by Germany’s combination of old world rigidity and new, postwar world extremism, whether in political or sexual behavior.

As a result of their country’s peculiar role, Americans in Germany were in a special position. Although the United States had joined in the fighting in World War I, it was only in its later stages. Most Americans were far from eager to be dragged into a new European conflict, which accounted for the strength of isolationist sentiments back home. Americans in Germany were put in a different category than the other winners of World War I: they were seen as almost neutral, far less vengeful than the French, in particular, and, in general, more willing to give the defeated Germans the benefit of the doubt. As observers, they could stand a bit outside and above the continental rivalries.

Like Americans everywhere, they also tended to live a privileged existence, observing the material deprivations and growing violence but usually sheltered from them personally. They socialized extensively with each other, celebrated Thanksgiving and other holidays, and enjoyed the trappings of the expat lifestyle while monitoring the bigger events that swirled all around them. Louis Lochner, who reported for the Associated Press throughout this period, made casual mention of life in “the American colony,” and the “enviable camaraderie” among the American correspondents, “even among those who are one anothers’ [sic] fiercest competitors.”

To be sure, tensions erupted between those who came to radically differing views of Hitler and the Nazis, and what their military buildup signified. Then, too, there were the personal jealousies and resentments. The American Embassy in Berlin was a much leaner outpost than embassies are nowadays, and the small, overworked staffs and their spouses were often feuding about both their political views and petty grievances. There also were fissures between the politically appointed ambassadors and the professional foreign service staffers and military attachés. Throw in the perceived scandalous behavior of an ambassador’s daughter and you have a recipe for real drama. All of this could happen in any diplomatic outpost, but in Berlin it was magnified by the unrelenting tensions that accompanied Hitler’s reign.

The American correspondents, by contrast, were far more numerous than they are today—reaching a peak of about fifty in Berlin in the mid-1930s. Those were the days when wire services, newspaper chains and dailies from a wide array of American cities across the country, not just from New York and Washington, fielded correspondents overseas, giving them remarkable free rein to pursue their stories. And radio broadcasters soon joined that mix.

As a Newsweek foreign correspondent in the 1980s and 1990s, I felt I was living in what, especially from the perspective of today’s cutbacks in the media business, looks like the golden era of journalism. But my predecessors in Berlin lived far more largely. Mowrer, for instance, set up a new office for the Chicago Daily News right above the “Kranzler Corner,” a famous café at the prestigious downtown intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden. It boasted a second-floor reception center for American visitors, who could come by to chat, read American newspapers and even dictate to the office secretary on occasion. This was more than a news bureau; it was almost a small diplomatic mission.

There were plenty of Americans, including several who bore household names, who dropped in to see what this new Germany was all about—the likes of writers Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis, architect Philip Johnson, broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, former President Herbert Hoover, the black sociologist and historian W. E. B. DuBois and, of course, aviator Charles Lindbergh. Somewhat surprisingly, it was no great feat for Americans and other foreigners to enter and explore this curious, darkening world. “One thing one forgets is how easy it was to travel around Germany then,” recalls historian Robert Conquest, who traveled all over Europe in 1938 with some fellow Oxford University students and dropped in on Germany as well. “It was far easier than in postwar communist countries.”

I always have been drawn to this period of history, seeking to understand how Hitler and his followers could have gained total control of Germany as quickly as they did, with all the ensuing devastating consequences. This had a direct impact on my family’s history as it did on millions of others’. My parents grew up in Poland, and my father fought in the Polish Army before escaping to the West to join up with Polish forces under British command. After the war, I was born in Edinburgh. My parents then sailed for the United States, where they started a new life as political refugees. That’s why I grew up as an American instead of a Pole.

As a foreign correspondent who did two tours in Germany—the first one in Bonn during the last years of the Cold War, and the second in Berlin in the late 1990s—I often wrote about how Germans dealt with the legacy of the Nazi past. But I have to admit I knew very little about the Americans who worked in Berlin in those dramatic times. There were exceptions, of course. My colleagues and I all knew about William Shirer, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and that the Adlon Hotel, which was rebuilt and reopened after German unification, had been the hangout for Shirer, Dorothy Thompson and other star journalists of the time. But I can’t say I had delved much into their personal histories.

When I began to do so for this book, I realized there was a rich vein of stories that not only provided insights into what it was like to work or travel in Germany in the midst of these seismic events but also offered a unique perspective on them. Through their experiences, I felt I was reliving this heavily dissected era with an intensity and immediacy that is often lacking elsewhere. Whenever possible, I drew on firsthand accounts—whether in memoirs, notes, correspondence or interviews with the occasional still living witness—to share that perspective with readers.

Some of these tales were published but long forgotten, while I found others in unpublished manuscripts and letters in various archives and libraries, or sometimes provided by the children of the authors. In the case of the young diplomat Jacob Beam, for example, who served in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin in the second half of the 1930s, his son Alex—a good friend from my Moscow days, when we both were stationed there as correspondents—provided me with a copy of his unpublished manuscript. Some of the most colorful details about life in Germany came from the unpublished writings of Katharine (Kay) Smith, the wife of Captain Truman Smith, who was still a junior military attaché when he became the first American official to meet Hitler.

It’s important to keep in mind that this is history as seen by eyewitnesses without the benefit of knowing where these events would lead. The Wannsee Conference that formalized elaborate plans for the Holocaust was still off in the future—January 20, 1942, to be exact. The German Army was only beginning to encounter its first serious setbacks on the Eastern Front as the remaining Americans in Germany were on their way out, following Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States. To be sure, the Americans had ample opportunity to witness or hear about the widespread persecution of the Jews and anyone else deemed an enemy of the new regime, along with Hitler’s string of first conquests and the early reports of mass killings. Some of these Americans demonstrated remarkable courage and prescience, while others stood back and averted their gaze, or, in a few cases, collaborated outright with the new regime.

But most of this book focuses on the perspectives and experiences of this special group of Americans during the run-up to the war and the Holocaust. As someone who has been privileged to report on more recent major events such as the collapse of the Soviet empire and the liberation of Central Europe, I understand how difficult it can be to sort out what is happening during a period of historic upheaval, and to make the right moral calls on how to behave in those circumstances. When you’re in the center of a whirlwind, daily life can continue with deceptive normality at times, even when the abnormalities, absurdities and injustices are all too apparent.

Instead of rushing to pass judgment on the Americans who found themselves in Hitler’s Germany, I have focused on telling their stories—and, wherever possible, letting those stories speak for themselves. The assessments of the Americans, where they were right or wrong, and where their moral compasses were on target or completely missing, should flow from their experiences, not from our knowledge based on the luxury of hindsight.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Andrew Nagorski has written an entertaining chronicle…‘Hitlerland’ brings back to life some early delusions about Hitler’s rise that now seem unthinkable. Any reader trying to puzzle out today’s world will be unsettled by the reminder of how easy it is to get things wrong.” —The Economist

“riveting….this is a book that is full of things I never knew, and I found all of them interesting. It should be on everybody’s ‘must read’ list who is interested in history.”—The Daily Beast, Michael Korda

"Hitlerland is a bit of guilty pleasure... fascinating."-Washington Post

"Compulsively readable and deeply researched"-The Weekly Standard

"A compelling work for World War II history buffs or anyone who wants to understand how such devastating evil emerged while the world seemingly watched"– Library Journal

"An engrossing study of the times made more fascinating and incredible in retrospect...contextually rich...[a] well marshaled study."– Kirkus

“Andrew Nagorski, a deft storyteller, has plumbed the dispatches, diaries, letters, and interviews of American journalists, diplomats and others who were present in Berlin to write a fascinating account of a fateful era.”

-Henry Kissinger

“Andrew Nagorski once again turns his perceptive, seasoned foreign correspondent's eye to a dramatic historical subject. This eye-opening account of the Americans in 1920s and 1930s Berlin offers a totally new perspective on a subject we thought we already knew. “

-Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History

"Andrew Nagorski’s Hitlerland is a fresh, compelling portrait of Nazi Germany, as seen through the eyes of a fascinating array of Americans who lived and worked there during Hitler’s rise to power. The extraordinary saga of Putzi Hanfstaengl, a Harvard graduate who became Hitler’s court jester, is just one of the many page-turning stories that makes Hitlerland a book not to be missed."

-Lynne Olson, author of Citizens of London

“The rise of Hitler and the Nazi state, one of the most consequential and profound narratives in all of world politics, receives compelling new treatment in Andrew Nagorski’s outstanding Hitlerland. By illuminating the disparate experiences of the era’s preeminent American diplomats, journalists, intellectuals and others, Nagorski has created an engrossing, harrowing and vividly drawn mosaic of eyewitness accounts to one of history’s most phenomenal catastrophes.”

-Gordon M. Goldstein, author of Lessons In Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam

“At times deliciously gossipy, at times thoroughly chilling, Hitlerland offers countless novel insights into Germany’s evolution from struggling democracy in the 1920s to totalitarian dictatorship in the 1930s. The intimate portraits from Hitler down add an almost tangible sense of the foibles, ambitions, insecurities and perversities of the relatively small top Nazi elite whose actions plunged our world into a catastrophe from which we are yet fully to recover. The Americans themselves come alive as a group of intense, enterprising journalists and diplomats faced with the greatest challenge of their lives.”

-Misha Glenny, author of The Balkans 1804-1999

Editorial Reviews

…tells a familiar story in an American accent…Hitlerland is a bit of a guilty pleasure. Reading about the Nazis is not supposed to be fun, but Nagorski manages to make it so. His touch is light, his point of view intentionally detached…Readers new to this story will find Hitlerland fascinating…
—The Washington Post

Gerard DeGroot

This account by former Newsweek staffer Nagorski (The Greatest Battle) offers precise firsthand observations of Hitler and his place in history, beginning in the 1920s, as people tried to decide whether he could be dismissed as a nonentity or posed a serious threat to world order. For instance, one American journalist in 1932 called Hitler “effeminate” while also acknowledging the “little corporal’s” ability to “smell the trend of mass feeling” of discontent. Nagorski draws on the writings and recollections of Americans who witnessed Hitler’s meteoric rise; the result is a multidimensional view of the Austrian-born tyrant. The invaluable element of this character study of the enigmatic führer is the accumulative clout of the comments of famed American outsiders such as writers Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Wolfe; journalists Edward R. Murrow, Dorothy Thompson, and William Shirer; diplomat George Kennan; and aviator Charles Lindbergh, who called Hitler “a great man.” Nagorski is drawing from the same well as Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, while lacking its strong narrative center. But Nagorski’s account is rich in anecdotal detail about how a man dismissed by many could hypnotize a nation and terrorize the world. 8 pages of b&w photos. Agent: Robert Gottlieb, Trident Media Group. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

This is an excellent, ably-written, in-depth, and well-illustrated treatment of a hitherto-overlooked aspect of the Third Reich: before, during , and even after its fall . . . a true gem . . . an entertaining read . . .

Military Advisor

Andrew Nagorski has written an entertaining chronicle…‘Hitlerland’ brings back to life some early delusions about Hitler’s rise that now seem unthinkable. Any reader trying to puzzle out today’s world will be unsettled by the reminder of how easy it is to get things wrong.” —The Economist

“riveting….this is a book that is full of things I never knew, and I found all of them interesting. It should be on everybody’s ‘must read’ list who is interested in history.”—The Daily Beast, Michael Korda

"Hitlerland is a bit of guilty pleasure... fascinating."-Washington Post

"Compulsively readable and deeply researched"-The Weekly Standard

"A compelling work for World War II history buffs or anyone who wants to understand how such devastating evil emerged while the world seemingly watched"– Library Journal

"An engrossing study of the times made more fascinating and incredible in retrospect...contextually rich...[a] well marshaled study."– Kirkus

“Andrew Nagorski, a deft storyteller, has plumbed the dispatches, diaries, letters, and interviews of American journalists, diplomats and others who were present in Berlin to write a fascinating account of a fateful era.”

-Henry Kissinger

“Andrew Nagorski once again turns his perceptive, seasoned foreign correspondent's eye to a dramatic historical subject. This eye-opening account of the Americans in 1920s and 1930s Berlin offers a totally new perspective on a subject we thought we already knew. “

-Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History

"Andrew Nagorski’s Hitlerland is a fresh, compelling portrait of Nazi Germany, as seen through the eyes of a fascinating array of Americans who lived and worked there during Hitler’s rise to power. The extraordinary saga of Putzi Hanfstaengl, a Harvard graduate who became Hitler’s court jester, is just one of the many page-turning stories that makes Hitlerland a book not to be missed."
-Lynne Olson, author of Citizens of London

“The rise of Hitler and the Nazi state, one of the most consequential and profound narratives in all of world politics, receives compelling new treatment in Andrew Nagorski’s outstanding Hitlerland. By illuminating the disparate experiences of the era’s preeminent American diplomats, journalists, intellectuals and others, Nagorski has created an engrossing, harrowing and vividly drawn mosaic of eyewitness accounts to one of history’s most phenomenal catastrophes.”
-Gordon M. Goldstein, author of Lessons In Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam

“At times deliciously gossipy, at times thoroughly chilling, Hitlerland offers countless novel insights into Germany’s evolution from struggling democracy in the 1920s to totalitarian dictatorship in the 1930s. The intimate portraits from Hitler down add an almost tangible sense of the foibles, ambitions, insecurities and perversities of the relatively small top Nazi elite whose actions plunged our world into a catastrophe from which we are yet fully to recover. The Americans themselves come alive as a group of intense, enterprising journalists and diplomats faced with the greatest challenge of their lives.”
-Misha Glenny, author of The Balkans 1804-1999

From the Publisher

Nagorski (director of public policy, EastWest Inst.; The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II) provides an insightful account of the views of Americans, including diplomats, journalists, authors, and expatriates, who resided in post-World War I Germany and witnessed the birth of the Nazi political machine. Much as in Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts, Nagorski uses both published and unpublished material to provide detailed personal versions of this grim period of history. While Larson mainly focuses on American ambassador William E. Dodd and his family, Nagorski provides experiences and perceptions from a wide range of figures, such as diplomat George Kennan, novelist Sinclair Lewis, later CIA director Richard Helms, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and future television anchorman Howard K. Smith. Nagorski effectively demonstrates how Americans present in Germany during the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich were deeply affected and how many in fact grasped the horrific global implications. VERDICT A compelling work for World War II history buffs or anyone who wants to understand how such devastating evil emerged while the world seemingly watched. [See Prepub Alert, 9/22/11.]—Mary A. Jennings, Sno-Isle Libs., Camano Island, WA

Library Journal

A contextually rich look at the buildup of Nazi power, revealing the feebleness of Americans' assessment of the future danger. In these seemingly casual impressions recorded in newspapers, letters, magazines, diaries and diplomatic reports, many Americans rooted in interwar Germany failed to see the menace in the increasingly inflammatory Nazi rhetoric, as Nagorski (The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow that Changed the Course of World War II, 2007, etc.) depicts in this well-marshaled study. Or if they did--e.g., Chicago Daily News correspondent Edgar Mowrer or Foreign Affairs editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who interviewed Hitler on Apr. 27, 1933, and recorded, "So completely has the Republic been wiped out"--they were not believed. On one hand, most well-clad Western observers were approving of the German sense of method and order; on the other, the Americans were appalled by the enormous discrepancy in wealth between rich and poor and the Weimar Republic's reputation for sexual licentiousness, especially homosexuality. Nagorski looks at the first wave of fawning observers, if not admirers, of the brash young agitator who engineered the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, including U.S. Envoy Alanson B. Houghton, an industrialist who threw grand parties and blamed America for Germany's economic woes, and Karl Henry von Wiegland, reporter for Hearst, who described Hitler as a "man of the people." Some of the more shameless hangers-on included Ernst Hanfstaengl, a half-American, Harvard-educated aristocrat who became enamored of Hitler and served as his publicist; Charles Lindbergh, who shared aircraft secrets and a ringside box at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; and young Martha Dodd, good-time daughter of the American ambassador in Berlin. Few spoke out against Hitler's virulently anti-Semitic message, and many sheepishly covered over their early lapses in later memoirs. An engrossing study of the times made more fascinating and incredible in retrospect.

Kirkus Reviews