Hjalmar Schacht has been reviled by many as the man who financed Hitler's plan for world war. In fact he was tried at Nuremberg for that very thing. But he was acquitted (by the skin of his teeth!). Here he presents his view of what he accomplished as President of the Reichsbank (at two different times) and as Minister of Finance -- and why he quit. Although autobiographies of those who knew Hitler and worked with him are generally self-serving to acquit themselves of blame, Schacht's is one of the most believable. For those of us who know nothing of the machinations of world economics, this book is a fascinating, and easy to read, presentation.

This is an excellent and very useful work, and the entries are very sensible. My school didn't have a copy of it (for shame!), so I just went and bought my own, and have used it often. I got mine for $300--a lot, I know, but worth it. [....]

I was surprised to find that this book was available in the US. It's one of the classic Swedish novels, Söderberg is in known for his fine, poetical and elegiac prose, I judging from the other review the translator managed well!
The story is simple but very moving. I sometimes felt that parts of it was dated, but at the same time it is also very update, love doesn't change does it?
Söderberg is also the master of portraying the city of Stockholm, regarded as one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.
This is a fine piece of writing, which I can recommend to anyone who wants read a moving story about love and loss and anyone interested in Swedish literature.

I was not expecting much, and what did I find? Strindberg! Excruciating dilemmas a sensitive person faces in his/her intimate relations as he/she grows into adulthood and a place in the world. Sweet tender love distracting the mind; discoveries about self and other as the fatal plunge works through its effects, destroying happiness and self regard and faith in the good will of the Other whom one has loved. Strindbergian anguish. And yet withal an honest tale true-told, that leaves the reader not depressed ...but released. The experience has been cathartic. One feels grateful, even fond: sadness, even fondness for the man who drew so honestly and fully upon his own life experience to create art.
And a word for the translator: Bravo! I particularly appreciated the cleanness, the unwordyness of the prose that gives it a modern ring in the good sense of the word.

"Doctor Glas" (1905), by Hjalmar Soderberg (1869-1941), is the philosophically conflicted diary of Tyko Glas, a young medical doctor in Stockholm, Sweden's largest city, in the form of his personal written diary. He tells us he is just thirty years old and looking for adventure, a progressive and aesthetic intellectual in a conservative city. He disdains the many requests he receives for abortions, invariably turning them away, not of his own beliefs, but because he fears Sweden's hypocritical society would ostracize him.

One day a young lady named Helga provides his life a twist, coming to his examination room, pleading for him to declare she has an "infection of the womb", so her husband of six years, Pastor Gregorius, will not touch her sexually. In truth, she has another man in mind. Glas knows Gregorius personally, and despises him for his own reasons, but after some moral agonizing, the young doctor takes the bull by the horns, "diagnosing" Gregorius with a "weak heart", telling him sex could kill him. This medically-enforced chastity drives Gregorius mad, and he "rapes" his wife out of frustration one night. To diffuse the elevating tension, Gregorius takes a brief trip to another town, during which his wife openly appears in public with her lover back home on Stockholm's streets. Glas, the first-person narrator of this book, reflects on the meaning of life, recalling the young girls he knew earlier in life, admitting he has never held a female in an embrace, and finding himself falling in love with Helga himself.

In his diary, Glas wonders if abortion and murder are not similar, in the sense that both relieve a burden of life. Glas wonders if Gregorius could justifiably be killed to relieve the "burden" upon his wife Helga. He reflects on morality, love, sex, and religion, his thoughts become increasingly feverish. He debates the issue through his diary, turning through various twists of logic, trying to find a relative position which is simultaneously moral and expedient. He even goes so far as to prepare two tablets of potassium cyanide, one for the pastor, and one for himself, should his plan go badly. He clearly loses mental clarity with his obsession over this issue.

Will he actually try to kill Gregorius? Will he woo Helga for himself? Will he drop the entire issue, and snap back to reality? Will he accomplish the impossible reconciliation between morality and his impulses? The resolution will be an interesting one, but Glas will offer only one insight: "Life, I do not understand you."

The book itself is nicely written, the prose lovely of description, polite, high-toned, and at times romantic, and the subject matter frank, from schoolboy wonderment and embarrassment, to "husband's rights" and the moral place of abortion, euthanasia, murder, love, sex, infidelity, and unrequited love in society. The narration is elegant, and this brief novel (150pp) is actually surprisingly substantial. The tone is thoughtful throughout, and an interesting book to read.

(Note: Some readers might have some fun knowing there is a very interesting website, created by a fan, which features this book's various Stockholm locales posted in photos.)

This is the story of the world famous clown Jac Tracbac, who lives in Hollywood. He is visited by a distant relative from Sweden and the ageing clown relives his youth and childhood in the old country. This is Hjalmar Bergmans last book he ever wrote. It's the story of an ageing artist who gathers his powers for one last grand performance, this is the closest thing to an autobiography that Hjalmar Bergman ever wrote. It's well worth reading

Hard as it is to imagine, there lurks beneath the layer of casually well-dressed, pancake eating, gallery peeking outsiders from urban centers to the South, a stratum of history where, in Door County, Wisconsin, people actually depended on the logging of trees and the maintenance of big-lake shipping vessels for their daily bread. This book explores that layer, as well as the prior layer of Indians and missionaries, followed by the Moravians.

The Indians gave it the name "Door" for reasons related by Holand, and the Indians were practitioners of especially brutal methods of starving, tricking and torturing each other in battles that ranged up this peninsula, and downward to the West along the Southern shores of Green Bay.

Interestingly, Ephraim was "A Venture in Communism" but now is surely more of a venture in condominiumism.

Peter Rowley, the name-giver to Rowley's Bay, turns out to have been a land speculator selling chunks of a new city to other speculators, which would be built in spite of the total lack of any farming, fishing, or timber industry. It did not work. Still, it's a charming story wedged into this peninsular history, and its part of the unique charm of this piece of land poking out into Lake Michigan that it has produced such individuated little histories tied to discrete bays running up both sides with one extra measure of history allocated to Washington Island at the top.

Importantly, this history achieves a kind of brand of tribal story telling which conveys the character of the place without becoming cutesy or even self-conscious.

Those parts of the book that deal with Schacht himself are OK. Those parts dealing with the bigger picture are poorly written and contain errors.

Afraid to say that Weitz's book is littered with errors as regards basic facts of the Nazi era and the inter-war period in general. This won't matter to those who have a good knowledge of the times, but students fresh to the subject should beware. The heavy reliance on US news reports of the time suggests a certain thinness of research. Even so, the picture of Schacht that emerges is reasonably well-balanced and so the book is worth a try.

As a biographical note:

John Weitz the author of this book, is the same John Weitz that was a popular US clothing desinger in the second half of the 20th century. He was also an intelligence agent for the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA during and immediately after WWII. Ian Fleming mentioned Weitz as the prototype of his character, James Bond.

Weitz is also the father of Paul and Chris Weitz, the directors of "American Pie", and "About A Boy", and admirably not "American Pie II".

The stories are very interesting, and from that point a very good read, but I have a hard time believing that these are all true tales of the authors life. The sence of embelishment gets in the way sometimes while reading this.