Friday, June 28, 2019

Splendid Sentences, Part 21: William L. Shirer on Hitler's Final Hours

Toward the end of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, William L. Shirer writes that unto death Hitler learned nothing of Nazi failures, as proven in the Fuehrer's two final documents, his last will and his political testament:
Indeed, in the last hours of his life he reverted to the young man he had been in the gutter days in Vienna and in the early rowdy beer hall period in Munich, cursing the Jews for all the ills of the world, spinning his half-baked theories about the universe, and whining that fate once more had cheated Germany of victory and conquest. 
At 62 words, that's a lot of sentence. Here Shirer summarizes both his 1,245-page book about Hitler's 12 years in power and the dictator's sociopathic (cursing the Jews), distorted (spinning half-baked theories), paranoid (whining that fate) worldview. Shirer chooses reverted to signal Hitler's failure to evolve as a rational, moral human being, returning the 56-year-old man to his irresponsible youthful days. The writer also drops the comma after life to move matters along, and he inserts the serial (or Oxford) comma after universe to help the reader manage three long phrases of  10, 10, and 12 words.

 Read previous installments of  "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:
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