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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting but not very comprehensive,
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This review is from: Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement: A Study in the Politics of History (Hardcover)
It always amazes me that humans have such a short attention span when it comes to history that we have to relive it every generation or so at horrific cost. The anti-war movements over the years are always finding ways of ignoring the lessons of history when bad guys are given free rein long enough to cause immense pain and suffering along with millions of deaths. Chamberlain was one of those so scarred by WWI that he would do anything to avoid another battle, even if it meant that nipping Hitler in the bud would have saved scores of millions of lives. His single-minded focus on appeasement (before it became a dirty word) was the absolutely last course that should have been followed when the Nazis came to power and started to violate all of their treaty obligations of WWI.
Admittedly Chamberlain was more of a follower than a true leader, following public sentiment instead of shaping it and counseling about the dangers of feeding the beast that was Hitler's Germany in the 1930's. In many ways he was very much out of the Bill Clinton mode of using his own focus groups of public crowds and newspapers (before they were to become a science) to justify allowing Hitler to become far stronger than he became after years of ignoring the problem. The parallels between bin Laden and Hitler in this context are chilling. Fuchser wrote this book over 20 years ago, and had access to letters and documents that no other scholar had up to that point, but he was not allowed to copy them, only summarize them, so that only a few true insights into the mind of Chamberlain come out. But those few passages reveal a deeply flawed man, so obsessed with avoiding conflict that he guaranteed it. His desire to follow in his father's and brother's footsteps as a great statesman led him to take the world into a war that really could have been avoided if he had been a true leader. While this book is not a waste of time, it really does not have the kind of historical perspective, going into greater detail about the forces at work while Chamberlain did everything he could to bring "peace in our time." I don't know if it is because Chamberlain seems to have been a really cold and lifeless man, or because Fuchser is not a very good author. This is a rather unmoving book, with little of the suspense that the period involved. It does provide the greatest insight into the man and the events earlier in his life that shaped him that I have ever read, so from that perspective it was worth reading, but Kagan and Fromkin have written much more detailed and gripping accounts of this period and how the forces of evil nearly prevailed because of a seriously flawed and weak Chamberlain. This book is actually more of a study of how the wrong man in office at the wrong time can result in great tragedy. Whether you think that leaders are naturally born vs. shaped by their life experience, or the other way round, this book shows that Chamberlain failed on both counts.
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