Customer Reviews

Triumph of the Third Reich

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Mr. Cooper makes many dozens of historical errors in every chapter. The dialogue is stilted and childish. the flow of the narative is choppy. The premise is so wholy absurd as to be totaly unbleievable. In short I wonder if the author is a Jr. High School student. If I could give negative stars, I would

I'm not sure how many possibilities there are in infinity, but this one does not cut the mustard of alternative histories. (Hacknied at worst). Couda' been better...Rommel and the folk do not shine well within. A bit o' rose glasses and the best of the reich's generals and associated staffers and a 70-80's "reich" through very rose colored glasses. A good read, but one that is REALLY implausible...At least as seen in retrospect and through a quasi-historian's eyes....

An all around terrible book. The details are so inaccurate that I question how much time was put into the research. Anyone with a cursory familiarity with the second world war will find several dozen errors in each chapter. The characters and events are so cliche as to make the story unbelievable and uninteresting. Finally, there was not even an attempt to proofread the manuscript. There were many errors in spelling, grammar, and detail. In other words, don't bother. There are plenty of good alternative history books to choose from.

This is without a doubt the worst book I've ever read. Dialogue is comically bad, as though only one character speaks throughout the book. I forced myself to finish the book, then recycled it.

Readers of alternate history will find Edward Cooper's Triumph of the Third Reich an interesting and rewarding experience. It is well researched and well written.

Those of us who have wondered what would have happened during World War II if the Nazi had been the first to develop vastly superior weapons in quantity, will find Cooper's narrative frightening and compelling. Yet, in the end, it is also a triumph of sanity and humanism over the madness of war. The German people finally reject authoritarian politics, racism, and hatred. They prove themselves to be both civilized and humane. This book is very sympathetic toward the German people and their struggles to atone for their mistake of embracing Hitler and fascism. As such, it will probably not appeal to modern day Neo-Nazis.

Cooper's coordination of complex personalities and events in Germany, France, Italy, England, America, Japan, and The Soviet Union is quite remarkable. The dangers of unrestrained nationalism are demonstrated as patriotic heroes from different countries struggle and often succeed in destroying each other.

And yet the real struggle for supremacy is not on the battlefields but in the scientific laboratories where the Germans win. But ironically, there is an even more basic contest going on at the same time, which the Nazis lose. This is the struggle of the human spirit for freedom. Freedom loving people in Germany and also in other countries reject authoritarian government.

One can only hope that Cooper's optimism is somewhat based upon reality rather than a naive assessment of human nature. Eric Hoffer and others claim that the vast majority of people crave authoritarian certainty and strong leaders who will tell them what is true and false and who to love and who to hate. They claim that most people don't like the responsibility that comes with doing their own thinking and making their own decisions. They are only too willing to turn their freedom and decision making over to some authority figure. We can only hope that Cooper's optimistic view of human nature is more accurate than those who offer little hope for the future.

I have recommended Triumph of The Third Reich to my friends.

Have you ever begun reading a book and gotten so distracted by the technical and English errors? Have you ever waded through a manuscript that was so filled with misspelled words, terrible grammatical constructions and English so poor that a 6th grader can spot the errors? This describes my experience with this book.

A few months ago I went on a buying binge of alternate WW2 books, which, unfortunately, included this incomprehensible piece of trash. The author has no style, no concept of how to provide the reader with any sense of continuity, absolutely no schooling in the German language, and very lame technical errors liberally sprinkled throughout the book. For instance: There is a passage that refers to the yield of the atomic device as "twenty thousand kilotons." This comes out to 20 megatons. By contrast the device that was dropped on Hiroshima was a 15 kiloton device. There are many anachronistic references to agencies (NSA, US Air Force) that didn't exist until after the war.

Then there is the junk German: "frau" is a noun and should be capitalized. "tochers" should be "Töchter," which is the plural of "Tochter," the word for daughter. "Prostituierens" is a nonsense word. In this context the author probably means "Prostituierte." "prostituieren" is a verb, not a noun. "Kornel" is not a German word. The author probably means "Oberst," the German equivalent of colonel. "Kreigsmarnie" is a poor spelling of "Kriegsmarine."

The response by an editor at this publisher who responded to my extensive list of problems replied, "In a topic of Alternative History, we depend on the author for his research. And as we come across corrections that need to be made, we apply then in the next printing." In other words, they don't even do a copy edit of the basic English, which was totally atrocious and bears no relation to the language you and I speak and write.

Not recommended on any level. I wish there were negative stars to rate this juvenile attempt.

I'll have to start out by agreeing with the other reviewer who noted that the research on this book was lacking. There are parts in this book where it appears the author just randomly grabbed names from history books. As to the proofreading, when using a foreign language in a book learn at least the phrase you're going to use. His German looked like he used literal translation for everything (ex noone would ever say "kommen und sehen").

The story itself was okay from the pure fiction standpoint (it bombs as an attempt at alternate historical fiction). And in no way approaches the calliber of say Turtledove.

This is a poorly written book, with clanging shifts of scene and plot. As a piece of writing it ranks below most books I have ever read, and as a piece of alternate history it is simply excerable. There are three main reasons I say this. 1 The author makes absolutely no attempt whatsoever to say why technological developments are so. While a deux ex machina may be a fine plot device in Euripides it is not so in a book pruporting to be a serious alternate history. Why did thins turn out so? At least turtledove has the decency to invoke toothy clawy aliens. No such luck here. In avoiding this issue the author shows his lack of knowledge both of the Nazi regimne and how it operated but also of basic technology. 2 So, Ireland was 'neutral , but heavily pro German' in WWI, was it ? That would explain why allied airmen and sailors were immediatly shipped to Northern Ireland and the axis ones were interned, why , proportional to population the RoI provided more fighting men for the UK armed forces (not to mention all the labourers and factory workers who freed up equivalent numbers of UK soldiers etc) than any other part of the British Isles, and why ..... Oh, why bother, the authors sloppy research in this causes me to wonder about other areas of which I am , like he, ignorant. 3 The book is simply badly written. Plot changes and shifts come out of nowhere, motivation is missing, characterisation an insult to cardboard and the layout and feel more like poor quality samidzat than a proper published nove.

Give it a miss.

I met Mr. Cooper who was generously donating his time to help at a museum in Ogden, Ut.

He mentioned his book, and I bought it because of our meeting. I liked the book as it was not just a single event turn in history, but rather multiple events intertwining. Definitely a good read and excellent historical research.

An all around terrible book. The details are so inaccurate that I question how much time was put into the research. Anyone with a cursory familiarity with the second world war will find several dozen errors in each chapter. The characters and events are so cliche as to make the story unbelievable and uninteresting. Finally, there was not even an attempt to proofread the manuscript. There were many errors in spelling, grammar, and detail. In other words, don't bother. There are plenty of good alternative history books to choose from.