Unholy Alliance by Peter Levenda Summary and Reviews
|
Our Price: $44.99 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $8.23 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Unholy Alliance
Book Review: Peter Levenda's work tells of his interest in the occult.
Summary: 3 Stars
If you reread this work, you overcome your impression of how interesting the occult involvement has been in modern day society, and you start to see a need Mr. Levenda had in writing his book. But I am of the opinion that Levenda is inexperienced in book presentation. He himself admits that the book changed and evolved very dramatically from when he had first set out to present a story. This speaks of a presumed novice approach to his endeavor, and lends a certain weakness to any centralized theme he might have tried to relate. Perhaps more experience would have lent him better results.
The most remarkable thing about Levenda seems to be his own struggle with the occult that comes out in bits and pieces. It would be interesting to know more about the author but that appears difficult to obtain. It appears as if he has done a massive literature search though at times it seems as if he conveniently applied it to personal experiences.
Book Review: Pulp research...
Summary: 2 Stars
While I found this book slightly entertaining and the subject itself bouyant enough to support volumes of this kind of literature I'm afraid I found the aim of the thesis weak and uncompelling.Levenda often juxtaposed Hitler with individuals involved in the early German/English occult movements of the 19th and 20th century without EVER clearly providing documented proof of their ACTUAL influence on Hitler as an individual or even as a hidden shadow policy behind the Nazis as a political force. If anything, those occultists close to Hitler often came to a bad end. Hanussen for example.
Are we to believe that Levenda could actually guess what Hitler was motivated by and thinking about in 1939 without this documentation? Lets not even mention all the secondary sources that were used to formulate many of his assertions.
I was so unimpressed with Levenda's approach in fact, that I found myself questioning even the smallest of his assertions from complete lack of trust in the author's bias. He seems to have gone into the research already knowing the answer, and after all that's not research, that's thesis padding. This book might as well have been written by Charles Berlitz for all its credibility.
Lots of smoke, very little fire. I think it would have been a much more satisfying book without all the conjecturing that was rampant throughout and in that case may have ended as a very short book.
Read it anyway though, since it does have some interesting tidbits, just don't take it as the definitive book on Nazi occultism since he draws very few empiric connections between the two camps beyond anecdotal similarities...
Book Review: new edition----a must-read!
Summary: 5 Stars
In this definitive history of Nazi religious/occult thinking, UNHOLY ALLIANCE meticulously traces the roots of this primal evil. Levenda's warnings that the beast is not dead, but sleeping, and likely to wake again, have become tragically accurate. Indeed, while the author has been at pains to avoid hysteria and paranoia, passage after passage in this brilliantly-researched mix of historical analysis and contemporary investigation is eerily prescient.The new edition adds an author's update, a small but excellent photo section, and a Foreword by Norman Mailer who reveals his own take on magic and Nazi occult thinking. Sadly, the daily headlines supply so many examples of the dangers of cultic, far-right ideologies that one frankly hopes the author is sketching out notes for a third edition. The darkest instincts of human nature are now everyday images on the TV news. Two misfit high school honor students spend a year planning vengeance on their tormenters and turn an affluent school campus into an abbatoir---on Hitler's birthday. And as the Colorado suburb mourns its dead children, a wave of copycat crimes and threats sweeps America. And we learn that the teenaged killer/suicides of Columbine had hoped to hijack jets and crash them into--yes--the World Trade Center.
We know only too well what is exploding into our headlines. For thoughtful readers who want to understand where and how it began, and continues underground right now, UNHOLY ALLIANCE belongs at the top of any must-read list. The expanded content, the photos, the essay by Mailer, and a handsome format all enhance this classic that belongs in the library of every reader with a serious interest in world affairs. A disturbing but very worthwhile read.
1 2