rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

Chapter 33AFTERWORDThis book had a surprising reception.No one – not my publisher, my editor, my agent, my friends – believed thatthe public would buy a book so long, so full of footnotes, so expensive, and onsuch a subject. My lecture agent had told me there was no more interest inHitler and the Third Reich and that 1 would have to talk about something else.My publisher printed only 12,500 copies in advance.The fact that the book started at once to attract considerable readershipwas therefore a pleasant surprise to us all. I never kept track of the sales myself– either of the hardcover edition brought out by Simon and Schuster or themass-market paperback edition brought out by Fawcett. I was surprised to heartwo or three years ago that the Book-of-the-Month Club had sold more copies ofThe Rise and Fall of the Third Reich than of any other book in its history. Buthow many copies, I have no idea. The book also did well abroad – in Britain,France, and Italy, though less well in Germany.The reviews of the book, except in Germany, were much more perceptivethan I had expected. And though the academic historians, on the whole, werecool to the book and to me (as if I were a usurper with no right to invade theirfield – to write good history, they said, you had to teach it), there were notableexceptions.H. R. Trevor-Roper, for instance. I felt some trepidation when I first heardthat the Sunday New York Times Book Review had given him the book toreview. He was a prestigious historian at Oxford whom I much admired – Ihad found his book The Last Days of Hitler very valuable. But British bookreviewers at that time had been rather hard on American authors, and besides,as an eminent academic, Trevor-Roper might share, I thought, the disdain ofhis American colleagues for journalists who try to write history. So I concludedI would probably be clobbered in the publication that was most important forAmerican writers and their books.But Trevor-Roper too surprised. The headline above his page-one reviewgave a hint as to what he would have to say:LIGHT ON OUR CENTURY’S DARKEST NIGHTThe Awful Story of Hitler’s Germany Is Movingly Told in Masterly Study1027