Reviews for How to Improve Your Score on Reading Competency Tests

The average rating for How to Improve Your Score on Reading Competency Tests based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-06-05 00:00:00 Matthew Timmons 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.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-03-20 00:00:00 Jay Margolis Capsule review (due to time constraints): One of the towering and invaluable testimonies to come out of the war, Speer's account of the Hitlerian inner circle has proven a gold mine for subsequent writers on the Nazi regime. Because he was one of the few higher-up henchmen to show some measure of contrition at the Nuremberg Trials and own up to guilt for his role in the administration of the Reich and the parallel horrors, Speer received the relatively "light" punishment of 20+ years in prison instead of the noose. Was Speer's contrition sincere, or was he something of an unreliable narrator? I think a little of both, but the veracity of his documentation of the daily affairs seem to me to be beyond reproach. His love-hate, pseudo father-son relationship with Hitler comes off as oddly humane and complex, as much as a conundrum to us as it must have been for him. If Speer had been hung, we'd have lost out on this matchless insider account. I find it interesting that Hitler penned a manifesto early in his career while in jail that got the whole horrorshow rolling, while his surviving "heir," of sorts, was the one to pen his own jail tome of post-mortem summing up. I had taken extensive notes and had much more to say, but have to keep it short. This is absolutely essential World War II reading, and I intend to follow it up by reading some of the other accounts examining Speer and his role from a more distanced and objective perspective. The book might also have you questioning the nature of your own complicity and opportunism in the world, and the denial of guilt when the repercussions are out of sight and out of mind. eg/kr '19