Michael Tanner
My first choice must be James Baldwin's Collected Essays (The Library of America, $35), which not only includes such classics as 'Nobody Knows My Name' and 'The Fire Next Time', but many other writings of extraordinary intelligence and rhetorical power. Baldwin is still a shamefully under- rated figure, so I hope this edition is readi- ly available in this country.
Only professional malice, I'm inclined to think, could account for the thumbs-down reception almost universally accorded to Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler (Macmillan, £25). His accounts of meetings with professional Hitlerologists — no won- der he refers early on to DeLillo's White Noise — cast light as unflinchingly on them as on Hitler, and together with John Lukacs' The Hitler of History (Random House, $14) this takes the question of the origins of Hitler's evil as far as, at the moment, it will go, and certainly further than Ian Kershaw's lavishly overpraised first volume biography, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (Allen Lane, £20).
Not entirely unrelated: Richard Osbome's Karajan: A Life in Music (Chat- to, £30) is a gripping account of a boring but hugely influential man, whose effect on the way music is made, marketed and appreciated has still to be explored in ade- quate depth.
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