Publication: The New York Review of Books March 9, 2017
Reviewed Books: "Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich" by Norman Ohler, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside

I had already read a review of this book earlier this year (by Mike Jay in the LRB) so I knew what to expect when I started reading this one. And a lot of what Beevor had to say was similar to what I had read already - when you are discussing the same book, this tends to happen. It is the additional details that are different and Beevor knows his topic. The fact that neither Hitler, nor the Reich were drug free is well known. Ohler goes deeper proving how the drugs made the Nazis in more than one way (and this is where Beevor slightly disagrees) and in the meantime reveals also the history of the pharmaceutical industry in Germany (in the usual way, important discoveries serve a war before they can be used elsewhere). And this review uses this as a base to show what the book is good at. The review also contains an explanation on how a not-historian ended up writing the book and why a serious book had weird chapter titles or why it sounds different.

I am still not convinced I want to read the whole book but I enjoyed the review and the thoughts of the reviewer. I can learn a lot more from the whole book but the review educates enough.