Book 2, 2011 – The Boy Who Dared, by Susan Campbell Bartoletti.

Written from the perspective of a young man during Hitler’s regime, this paints a picture of the Nazi years that I hadn’t thought of before. It’s very easy to look at Nazi Germany and condemn it, but this book lets us see the faces of the people who endured those years and didn’t support the regime, and what they endured.

S read this in school and encouraged me to read it. It’s a quick read, written for the 10-12 audience. It took me two weeks mostly because it’s been a busy two weeks. It give a very good overview of what was involved in Hitler rising to power, without the demonization of the German people that is in so many stories about this era. If anything, it errs a little far on the “I was only doing my job” attitude that was so much a part of Nuremberg, absolving many people who just did what they thought they needed to do to make it from day to day. It also implies that most people had no idea what was going on.

… which makes me wonder …

How much do we really know about what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan? Do we, and should we, believe what we are told about what’s going on there? To what extent should we be suspicious of the extreme reaction to the rather vanilla revelations that came out of Wikileaks?

Definitely worth reading. I think we lose perspective, and have a 20-year (tops) view of history, and tend to forget more than we remember.