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Rick Kingsbury landarch — This is the biography that started me on a lifetime love of snooping around in dead (mostly) people's lives. The year before I read this, willingly and without its' being assigned reading, I found a remaindered book of Victorian photographs that fascinated me. Of course, only the "best" people were in it, and I was intrigued to see that Winston Churchill had a mother at all, and that she was a beauty. How could this be? When I found this book, I was thrilled to read of her exploits, her disappointments, and her eventual rise to influence. It gave me a new window on the status of women in that time when females were chattel and many rich girls and women were not even "allowed" to read newspapers, let alone have an opinion. Of course, the constant theme of parties, romance, sex and money intrigued my teenage self, too.

Paper Ou paperou — hard to get through, but in the end its not terrible

Chris Cobb cobb1766 — This book is definitely essential reading if you have any kind of interest at all in either WWII, or the agency which individual people can have within a totalitarian system. Inside the Third Reich is a lengthy - in my edition, seven hundred pages, not including notes, bibliography or index - memoir written by Albert Speer, focusing on the years between 1933 and 1945 when he was Hitler's architect, his Minister of Arms and Munitions, and probably one of the closest things Hitler had to a friend. At many points it's not an easy book to read - not because Speer goes into any detail about the mass killings or the conditions in the concentration camps, but because of the detail which he goes into about the construction and requisition projects which formed so much of his work at the time, the repetitive ways in which he documents tea-time with Hitler. In some ways I think this is one of the most important features of the book. You get to see the sheer banality of the regime, the statistics and demographics which make up such a large chunk of the book showing off the bureaucracy of the Third Reich which was not so very different from many other western countries at the time, or since. His observations on Hitler's personality, his initial hero-worship for him, and his gradual later disillusionment, are truly fascinating to read about. Hitler is shown, not as a madman or as an evil mastermind, but as an actual person; the descent into delusion and denial in later life is made all the more dramatic by how almost-normal he seemed in the earlier part of the book. Speer does express regret in the book for the crimes which the Nazi regime committed, and for his part in them. This is not something which he came to realise over the course of writing his memoirs - from the Nuremberg trials, we do have footage of him striking his breast and saying mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Something, perhaps, of a realisation of the wrongs of the regime had already occurred to him from 1944 on, as shown by his attempts to block some or all of the scorched earth policy which Hitler tried to adopt in the last few desperate months of the war. However, I find it really and truly hard to believe that Speer was ever truly as naive and unaware as he was presented as being in the book, or that he was devoted to all the aims of Nazism with the exception of its racist ideologies. He certainly wasn't involved directly in any of the mass murder, but he did make use of slave labour in his construction projects and in the munition factories which he ran. He may have been described by others as the 'respectable Nazi'; but respectable or not, he was still a Nazi, who either found the racial policies of the regime acceptable, or capable of being ignored. Perhaps he didn't know; perhaps he didn't want to know, consciously or unconsciously. With an auto-biographical memoir of this nature and on this topic, it is hard to be certain. I think the only thing one can do is to read the book oneself, and make up one's own mind.

Elena Urumova elenaurumova — Rob Byrnes, author of the gay favorites "When the Stars Come Out", "Trust Fund Boys", and "The Night We Met", gives readers a glimpse into the world of two career criminals with his latest effort, Straight Lies, an entertaining, comic gay grifter novel. Grant and Chase are life partners and small-time crooks from Queens, New York, who have gotten by mostly from selling stolen cars for parts and playing bait and switch with internet predators. When these two con-artists learn about an amateur home video featuring out and proud film star, Romeo Romero, caught in a compromising position with a female acquaintance, they make it their mission to retrieve the tape and blackmail the actor for all he is worth. The first of many obstacles, though, is having to actually locate the incriminating evidence, which was left in a city cab by accident and ends up in the hands of Ian Hadley, columnist for the notoriously sudsy celebrity tabloid, The Eye, who has plans of his own for the scandalous discovery. Not to be outdone, Grant recruits fellow thief and former cabbie, Paul Farraday, and his realtor friend, Lisa, whose girlfriend, Mary Beth, becomes an essential accomplice in a plot to catch Romero--literally--with his pants down. In spite of the fact that there isn’t an honest or wholly decent character among this pathetic bunch, the novel is an irresistible page-turner, filled with adventure, intrigue and endearing idiocy. Readers will be hard pressed to put the book down until the outcome of this ridiculous, villainous scheme is revealed. A veritable race to the finish, as well as a lesson in Murphy’s Law, "Straight Lies" is an engaging, enjoyable novel that, unlike its characters, doesn’t pretend to be anything else.