Nightmare Years, The

At the Nuremberg rallies, when Hitler roared through the streets celebrating his newly won domination of Germany, William Shirer was there. In Munich, as Chamberlain abandoned the Czechs, Shirer was there. In Vienna during the night of the Anschluss; in Berlin, when Hitler loosed his Blitzkrieg on Poland - thus beginning World War II - William Shirer was there.

If ever a journalist was in the right place at the right time, it was William Shirer. Initially as a newspaperman and then as one of the first overseas radio correspondents, Shirer was everywhere it mattered in the 1930s and 1940s.

In this, the second volume of his memoirs, the prize-winning author provides an eyewitness and intensely personal vision of the crucible out of which the Nazi monster appeared. Fluent in German, married to a Viennese, Shirer had an uncanny sense of the shaping of events and sources that enabled him to act on his intuition. He met, knew, talked to - and occasionally drank with - Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Hess, Heydrich, Ribbentrop, Eichmann and dozens of High Command staff officers. Even Hitler he observed at first hand, close enough, he noted, "to kill him." Through articles, simultaneous translations of Hitler's speeches, and his own broadcasts Shirer desperately tried to warn the Western World of this demonic scourge. To his intense frustration, while he was read and listened to, the urgency of his message was not believed.

The Nightmare Years is not only a riveting, firsthand account of the events and men who set the world on fire, it is also the human story of a young American caught in these titanic events, struggling to survive and provide a normal life for himself, his wife and infant daughter. Reading this life is - as living it must have been - fascinating, powerful, and terrifying.

Shirer's tale of these harrowing and historic times is enhanced by ninety-two photographs he took or collected throughout the period. Some of them have never appeared in print before outside Nazi Germany. Some have historic interest; others are a reflection of a young man and his family, trying to live normal lives in an abnormal time. They reinforce the warm, human voice telling a devastatingly inhuman story.