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Historian by Default
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17389 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1990 |
2,591 Words |
| Author
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William L. O'Neill
William L. O'Neill is professor of history at Rutgers
University and is the author of American High: The Years of
Confidence, 1945-1960 and A Better World: Stalinism and the
American Intellectuals. |
20TH CENTURY JOURNEY
A Native's Return 1945-1988;
William L. Shirer
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990
497 pp., $24.95
After reporting on Germany from Berlin for much of the Hitler era, William Shirer became America's foremost interpreter of it. Now he tells the whole story of how he was forced into writing history as a result of forced departure by CBS and betrayal Edward R. Murrow.
In two previous volumes of his autobiography The Start: 1904-1930 (1976) and The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940 (1984), Shirer chronicled the experiences that determined his life's work. He began as a newspaperman, coming to Europe as a foreign correspondent in the 1920s. He arrived in Berlin at the end of 1934 still a reporter, but in 1937 Shirer joined CBS radio, which was then assembling the finest group of broadcast journalists the world has ever seen. Edward R. Murrow was its star and leader, and in addition to Shirer, Eric Sevareid and many others would become household names, for years to come. Together with other distinguished journalists such as John Gunther, Dorothy Thompson, and Vincent Sheean, these gifted professionals did all they could to inform Americans on what was at stake in Europe as the clouds of war loomed larger. None of them played a greater part than Shirer, whose broadcasts from Berlin, despite the limits imposed by Nazi censorship, did as much to alert the American public as any other single source. This period was the most important of his life and is described in Shirer's memoir The Nightmare Years, as well as in the intelligent and respectful miniseries based on it that recently aired on cable television. He was the right man for the job, an experienced and highly capable reporter who spoke German and had an Austrian wife. Further, he hated the Nazis and used all his considerable talents to expose them.
Shirer returned to New York with his wife and child at the end of 1940 with lengthy personal diaries that needed only assembling to become a solid book. Shirer cut and pasted them together, and under the title Berlin Diary, they were published on June 20, 1941. Berlin Diary was a smash hit, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a run-away best seller. Time magazine called the diary "the most complete news report yet to come out of wartime Germany," and even the august (London) Times Literary Supplement called it an outstanding “human as well as an historical document." President Roosevelt requested an autographed copy,
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