This book is interesting up to a point, and it contains some good anecdotes. But the author's almost touching need to prove that the Third Reich's admiration for Nietzsche was based solely on a combination of willful misreading and Elisabeth Nietzsche's influence leads him into all manner of logical quagmires.

At one point, he claims that Nietzsche's idea of the "superman" is "a concept intended to inspire but one which would develop sinister overtones in the wrong hands." This begs several questions: Whose are the right hands? How many people read--and believe-- Nietzsche without considering themselves to be at least larval supermen? Why should anyone be surprised when a philosopher who "rejected Christian morality and all other ideologies with moral imperatives," who claimed that "man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior," and who trumpeted the obligation of the self-styled strong to stamp out the "weak" is well received among brutal eugenicists with a lust for military power? I would think that a necessary competence for a career in philosophy would be to possess some slight awareness of the practical implications of one's ideas.

MacIntyre makes a convincing argument that Elisabeth Nietzsche was responsible for trying to pass her brother off as a rabid anti-Semite, but leaves one wondering precisely what benign effects Nietzsche's own drab and cruel political thought was supposed to have had on the world. Nietzsche would surely have rejected the notion that he was dealing in abstractions, so it seems disingenuous to treat his political notions as some form of Platonic ideal. MacIntyre's confusion is especially evident when, after praising Nietzsche for freeing mankind from the tyranny of false morality, he calls the Nazis "moral cripples"...beyond good and evil indeed!

A biography of Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth that would make good airplane reading. Partly that's because the bio is hung on a story, that of the author's trip to backwoods Paraguay to look for the colony she helped start.

I enjoyed this book because I found the story of Nueva Germania very interesting, although it turned out to be more of a biography of Elizabeth Nietzsche. I was expecting more on the actual inhabitants of Nueva Germania. I think it is still worth reading though because of its unique subject matter.