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Adult Education Blog

Book Club: November

10/30/2023 11:00:11 AM

Oct30

We will meet on Zoom, November 29, at noon to discuss our next book, Before the Books Were Burned: A Novel by Lawrence Samuel Shaw.
 
 
 
According to amazon.com: In Lawrence Samuel Shaw's novel, Before the Books Were Burned, we meet a young Adolf Hitler as a manipulative mendacious boy whose obsession with becoming a painter is met with angry disdain from his conventional, domineering father. Losing his parents at an early age, the opinionated, argumentative teenager leaves his Linz, Austria home for Vienna and later, Munich, Germany where he meets with artistic failure.

A lifelong historian with strong psychological insights, the author takes the existing facts and weaves together a lush tapestry of the early life of Hitler from his privileged childhood in Linz, Austria, to his aimless years in Vienna and later Munich; to the WWI battlefields, to his rise as leader of a fringe party called the NAZIS, culminating with his becoming the master of Germany. You will read in graphic detail of the horrific times in the trenches of WW1 and alarming sexual exploits.

One motive in writing this book was that when studying historical figures most had biographies that delved into the private details of their subject's lives, a thing missing in Hitler biographies, a phenomenon that aroused this author's curiosity.

A captivating, fast read, Before the Books Were Burned, explains how an eccentric misfit evolved into history's most notorious monster.
Thu, July 17 2025 21 Tammuz 5785