Not happy with this book at all as I purchased it looking to take my sorbets to a higher level. My disappointment came in the limited range for creative flavor combinations. This book is expensive and everything I found in it could be found in any everyday cookbook.

This book focuses on Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews and on recent efforts by some French writers, principally Robert Faurisson, to 'negate' this historical fact. Notoriously, a group of French Trotskyists has consistently backed Faurisson. So too has the US academic Noam Chomsky, who describes Faurisson as an 'apolitical liberal' when he has been well known in France as a pro-Nazi and anti-Semite since the late 1940s.

Finkielkraut explains that these leftists try to minimise Hitler's crimes in order to justify their dogmatic belief that all states are equally oppressive. They refuse to differentiate between fascism and democracy, between the Nazis and the Allies, or between Hitler and Stalin.

However, Finkielkraut himself 'negates' World War Two's main result, Nazism's destruction. He thinks all politics still revolves round the question of racism, particularly anti-Semitism, writing that 'The Faurisson affair is therefore situated at the core of our intellectual lives.' This overestimate of racism's importance corrodes all political judgments in the direction of liberalism.

For instance, the Introduction by Richard Golsan, a professor at Texas A&M University, describes all struggle against capitalism as anti-Semitic. He writes of Wilhelm Liebknecht, the renowned German socialist leader: 'While the logic employed by Liebknecht is not overtly anti-Semitic, it is implicitly so to the extent that Jews were associated with capital and thereby implicated in the abuses of the latter in the suppression of the working class.' This pro-capitalist flipside of liberalism also appears in Finkielkraut's sneers at 'dreams of revolution' and his ritual slanders of the Soviet Union and Stalin.

History has moved on since Nazism's destruction, and all Europeans have other problems to deal with now, principally the threat to their nations' sovereignty posed by Economic and Monetary Union.

A moderately interesting story and manner of telling it. Multiple perspectives are given from different characters, with the narrator being the prime teller. Overall, it adds up to not much with something of a non-surprise ending, though at the time it was written perhaps the irony was more affective.

The dusultory and repetitive nature of the telling of the story, while intentional, end up becoming tedious at times.