More on my hero, Jane Juska, from PW Daily for Booksellers (May 6, 2003)

Jane Juska on Sex, Writing, and Satisfying Conversation

Jane Juska is this season's literary sensation, the senior citizen who, with "Aristotelian discipline," composed a now-notorious personal ad in the New York Review of Books: "Before I turn 67--next March--I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me." The ad graces the cover of A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance (Villard), a book that has broken the Amazon.com top 100 bestseller list a week before publication.

After 27 years of near-celibacy and retired from a successful career teaching high school English, Juska was busy but lonely before she began her adventures. PW praised her chapters on visiting libraries or teaching English to prisoners even more than the randy parts: "Old women looking for sex may not seem a hot topic, but there's something universal in this woman's love affair with the written word." She spoke to PW Daily contributor Norman Oder by phone at her home in Berkeley, Calif.

PWD: You got 63 letters. How many men did you meet?

JJ: Eight, I believe.

PWD: How many are you still in touch with?

JJ: I am still in touch with four and intimately involved with three. And one would like to be, but I turned him down, Robert in the book. He gave me the title, we were talking about promiscuity or something, and he brought up that phrase.

PWD: He was the only one you were in love with.

JJ: I know, but I can get over that, too.

PWD: You got a marriage proposal.

JJ: And I turned it down. I'd have to give up too much; I assume fidelity is part of the contract.

PWD: Are the men you're involved with involved with other women?

JJ: Some are. Some aren't.

PWD: How can you do it emotionally, switch from man to man?

JJ: Oh my goodness. They're so different, one from the other, that I get to be not completely different, but I get to be a fuller person, because they bring out different parts of me. One thing they all have in common is that they're incredibly smart, and they're wonderful writers. So the question is a good one and, in all honesty, sometimes, I do have difficulty, and say: 'Come on Jane, simplify your life.' But who I would say farewell to?

PWD: Would it be nice if all three lived in Berkeley?

JJ: It would be nice if all three of them lived across the street. Having actual conversations with someone who is not out to win a point or to argue you into the ground is thrilling. Dr. Johnson, when asked if he enjoyed the dinner party the night before, said: there was a lot of talk but no conversation. I have lived a life in which there was a lot of talking, but not much conversation. When I was growing up, I was supposed to behave myself. I told my great uncle at a family gathering, 'You look just like President Truman,' and I was sent away from the table.

PWD: This book came out of a writer's group.

JJ: I didn't intend it to be a book; I was just going to make vignettes. It was terribly embarrassing for me--I'd have to leave the
room and go for a walk. I'd known these people for 15 years. Eventually, I stopped taking it to them. And I stopped writing it as a
novel, because it was a really bad novel, it was so phony. I named myself Nora. I did it because I didn't think anybody would believe if I told the facts. [One of the men] said, you have got to write this as nonfiction; he had read a couple of chunks.

PWD: You dedicate the book to Gene. Who's he?

JJ: A man who I knew from the Bay Area Writing Project, the first person who ever said he liked my writing. I'd write in a diary and say, 'What if Jane Austen saw this,' and I'd slap it shut. That voice prevented me from writing until 1982. He continued to nag me, for the next 20 years, and then he died. He took me literally by the elbow one day and said, 'we're going to the library and I'm going to show you something.' He showed me LMP and said 'someday, you're going to need it.' That's how I got my agent.

PWD: How many of the men read it?

JJ: Three. They've been absolutely wonderful. One in particular was enormously helpful getting me through this. He sort of took Gene's place, saying 'You can do it.'

PWD: TV producers would like the men to appear with you.

JJ: I wouldn't do that. Nor would they. One of them said, 'We're very private people, that's why we answer ads.'

PWD: How different is the book from the manuscript?

JJ: The chapter on my son was not there at all. My agent said, 'Your manuscript raises so many questions.' I asked myself, 'Jane, were you just meeting men?' No, I was very busy, doing this other stuff. Then the question came up: 'Jane, what were you doing 'til you were 67?'

PWD: Your thirtysomething niece was upset about you getting involved with a man more than three decades younger. Have you patched things up with her?

JJ: Well, yes. It's just something we don't talk about anymore. I don't think she would change her mind. But she's delighted by all
these goings-on, and she's very supportive. I got an e-mail from someone who said, 'I don't understand what such a young man would want with a 70-year old person.' I guess you'll have to read the book. I don't really feel a need to mount a defense.

PWD: Was it hard to write about sex?

JJ: A man in my writing group gave me a book called The Good Parts, excerpts of writing by famous people about sex. I read Updike's and thought, he can't do it, either. And he's such a fine writer. It gave me courage to go ahead and just write about the sex part and not worry about how badly I was going to surely do it.

PWD: You're writing another book about teaching.

JJ: It's tales from my classroom. I've been a teacher for 40 years. So, how is my teaching informed or influenced by each of those decades? The working thesis is that in order to be really good at something, you have to be willing to get fired. It again is a book about bending the rules. I don't have a publisher yet. But I have an agent, and she likes it.

PWD: What does your son think?

JJ: He's terrific. He said, 'Go get 'em, Mom, it's your turn.' But he's not going to read the book.

PWD: The New York Times ran a Styles section profile two weeks before publication.

JJ: And I went up to the mountains. Because I thought the phone would ring, and everything would happen, and it did. The memory on my phone machine was full. My e-mail was unbelievable. When this book got sold, I'd wake up in the middle of the night and see this headline, 'Interesting Story, Poorly Told.' The reviews have been incredible. I don't care if the world knows about my sex life, but the first bad thing anybody says about my writing, I'm going to the mountains again.

PWD: Do you have advice for women in a similar situation?

JJ: I just do not want to give advice. I'm not an expert. I do think, sometimes, people die early, they sort of give up on everything. But I would not advise everybody to do this.

FIRST REVIEW
HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX

By JUSTIN PENROSE

A CHILDLIKE feeling of excitement ran through me as I opened the book the world has waited two years to see.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has all the magic which makes the series a phenomenon — JK Rowling does not disappoint.

Scary, exhilarating, funny and tear-jerking, she has crafted a beautiful masterpiece that will cast a spell over kids of all ages. Even a 28-year-old dad of two.

At 776 pages, you could be forgiven for thinking Harry’s adventures are drawn out.

But by the end of the first chapter you are in no doubt this is a blockbuster of a book.

And at the start of the second, JK drops her first bombshell.

Wiz kid ... Harry is back

The darker plot than we’re used to twists and turns like a Slytherin snake, while shocks hit the reader like a muggle seeing a flying car in the sky.

Order of the Phoenix will make you laugh, it will make you cry.

Above all it will make you yearn for Rowling’s next instalment.

The master magician is back.

Unfortunately, there are still 46 days to wait before you too can be taken back to the land of Hogwarts.

Inquiry into 'dumped' Potter books

The author is unlikely to be impressed by the reported mishap
Police are being called in to investigate the suspected thefts of two copies of the eagerly awaited fifth Harry Potter book.

Author JK Rowling's agent said an inquiry had being launched following the reported find of two books dumped in a field near to a printing works.

Copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix were discovered by a walker in Bungay, Suffolk, who immediately contacted the Sun newspaper, which now has them in its possession.

The fifth instalment of the wizarding adventures is not due to be published until 21 June.

Neil Blair, from literary agency Christopher Little, said: "This is a matter that we are currently investigating and the investigation is focusing on the suspicion that this involved a theft."

Sussex Police said it had not yet received a complaint about the books.

'Shifty'

The copies were reportedly found a quarter of a mile (400 metres) from Clays Ltd, which will print hundreds of thousands of the book.

The walker, an unnamed 40-year-old father-of-two, telephoned The Sun, according to the newspaper.

It sent a journalist to bring the books to its headquarters in Wapping, east London, and is arranging to return them to publishers Bloomsbury.

The newspaper is also convinced a third copy is also in circulation, reporting a separate incident where a "shifty sounding" man had asked the newspaper for £25,000 in a suitcase for the first three chapters of the book.

The books, found without covers, were dedicated to JK Rowling's husband, Dr Neil Murray, 37, and her two children, with the inscription: "To Neil, David and Jessica who make my world magical."

The schoolboy wizard has already earned the author £280m, reportedly making her richer than the Queen.

Suffolk Police said it had received a call and it was planning to speak to the complainant later on Tuesday.

2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winners & Finalists

BIOGRAPHY

Winner: Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 3 (Alfred A. Knopf)

Finalists:

Gioconda Belli, The Country under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War (Alfred A. Knopf)

Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Viking)

T.J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)

Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (Alfred A. Knopf)


CURRENT INTEREST

Winner: Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (University of Minnesota Press)

Finalists:

Timothy Ferris, Seeing in the Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space and Guarding Earth from Interplanetary Peril (Simon & Schuster)

Nicolaus Mills and Kira Brunner (editors), The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention (Basic Books)

Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (Broadway Books)

Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books)


FICTION

Winner: Ian McEwan, Atonement: A Novel (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

Finalists:

Peter Cameron, The City of Your Final Destination (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Aleksandar Hemon, Nowhere Man (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

Kate Jennings, Moral Hazard: A Novel (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins)

Joanna Scott, Tourmaline: A Novel (Little, Brown and Company)


HISTORY

Winner: Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oxford University Press)

Finalists:

Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (Random House)

Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (Basic Books)

Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt)

Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (Alfred A. Knopf)


MYSTERY/THRILLER

Winner: George P. Pelecanos, Hell to Pay: A Novel (Little, Brown and Company)

Finalists:

Stephen L. Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park (Alfred A. Knopf)

Tod Goldberg, Living Dead Girl: A Novel (Soho Press)

Henning Mankell, One Step Behind [translated from the Swedish by Ebba Segerberg] (The New Press)

Scott Turow, Reversible Errors (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)


POETRY

Winner: Cynthia Zarin, The Watercourse: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf)

Finalists:

Terrance Hayes, Hip Logic (Penguin Books)

John Koethe, North Point North: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins Publishers)

J.D. McClatchy, Hazmat: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf)

Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California Press)


SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Winner: Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (HarperCollins Publishers)

Finalists:

Deborah Blum, Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection (Perseus Publishing)

Judith Hooper, Of Moths and Men: An Evolutionary Tale, the Untold Story of Science and the Peppered Moth (W.W. Norton)

Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (Walker and Company)

Richard Preston, The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story (Random House)


YOUNG ADULT FICTION

Winner: M.T. Anderson, Feed (Candlewick Press)

Finalists:

Kate Banks, Dillon Dillon (Frances Foster Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby: A Novel (Viking/Penguin Young Readers Group)

E.R. Frank, America: A Novel (A Richard Jackson Book/Atheneum Books for Young Readers)

Joyce Carol Oates, Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (HarperTempest/HarperCollins)


THE ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION

Winner: Arthur Phillips, Prague: A Novel (Random House)

Finalists:

Jay Basu, The Stars Can Wait: A Novel (Henry Holt and Company)

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel (Houghton Mifflin Company)

Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

Hari Kunzru, The Impressionist (Dutton/Penguin Group (USA))

Jane Juska is my hero...

April 27, 2003
Sex and the Single Senior
By ALEX WITCHEL

People smile at Jane Juska. There she is, on a rainy afternoon at the Gramercy Tavern in her cheerful red jacket, white hair tucked behind her ears, blue eyes bright behind her bifocals. "I'm agog at the forsythia," she exclaimed, marveling at the enormous arrangements. At 70, she seems to be what she is, a proud new grandma enjoying a day on the town. Though she clutched her lower back periodically — arthritis? — she ordered some wine and chatted happily about her writing. Here's a sample:

"Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me."

And how. Ms. Juska placed this personal ad in The New York Review of Books in the fall of 1999. Over the course of a month, she received 63 responses and spent the better part of a year following them up, an experience she recounts in her first book, "A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance" (Villard). It turns out that Ms. Juska did indeed have a lot of sex with a lot of men she liked, and still does, having seen one of them as recently as that morning. He's 35. Which might explain the lower-back problem.

"I didn't want to think, `What if I never had sex with a man again?' " Ms. Juska recalled of her decision to place the ad. "I didn't want to just sit there and think, `Wouldn't it be nice, if?' "

Ms. Juska, a retired high school English teacher (round-heeled is an antiquated slang expression for a promiscuous woman), was moved to action after seeing Eric Rohmer's film "Autumn Tale." Its plot involves a woman placing a personal ad in a newspaper on her middle-age friend's behalf.

"Before I got home I had written my ad in my head," Ms. Juska said. "But I did think, as if I were teaching a class and would ask my students, `What harm might this decision cause other people?' The only person that would be is my son. So I asked him, and he said: `Go get 'em, Mom. It's your turn.' The night I sent the ad in I felt so great."

Feeling great has become a new hobby for Ms. Juska in the 10 years since her retirement. She now lives in Berkeley and has lived in the Bay Area since the mid-1950's. After her divorce in 1972, she raised her son, Andy, now 38, as a single mother with no help from his father, she said. "My ex-husband wanted me to just collapse intellectually," she recalled. "Whether the topic was the weather, politics or rent increases, he was always argumentative."

She went through a bleak period during which she gained 70 pounds, drank heavily and lived in constant turmoil when her son dropped out of school and ran away from home. It took years of psychoanalysis, dieting and exercise to take control of herself again, shaking off the lingering effects of a Puritanical small-town Ohio childhood in the process.

For 27 years, she dated only sporadically. "Except for a couple of unhappy skirmishes, my relationship with men was nonexistent," she said. "I had enough trouble making a living, bringing up a son. Romantic trouble? That was too much."

Her work, she said, was her salvation. "Teaching was a passion for me," Ms. Juska said. "And when I left it, I just wasn't tired enough." She smiled. "My grandmother used to say, `Don't borrow trouble,' but I think borrowing trouble is a good idea. If you live your life staying safe you're going to lose."

She ate her lunch with great appetite — beet salad, lamb shank, sorbet — and finished every bite. She needed to keep up her strength; after lunch she was headed to New England to meet another gentleman friend she met through the ad.

Well, let's get down to basics. Some postmenopausal women feel a lessening of sexual desire, or at least are said to. That was apparently not her experience. "No," she said firmly. "I was probably even more interested because I wasn't as afraid as when I was younger, of not doing it right or, well, being thought randy."

But even women who are 20 years her junior might not feel keen to take off their clothes in front of men they don't know. And Ms. Juska describes her own imperfect body in exacting detail in her book. Was she not at all self-conscious?

She smiled, sort of. "Men didn't mind," she said. "It was always me pulling up the sheet and turning out the light. I never met a man who was afraid to take his clothes off. That's healthy, I think. They've forgiven themselves for sagging here and there." She took a deep breath. "The other day, my publisher sent me for media coaching, where they tape you so you learn how to speak on television," she said. "I don't feel 70, but I look it. Television does not lie. I went home after that and cried."

She cried over a few of the men, too, one in particular, with whom she fell in love. "In the end, he was just lonely and wanted a friend," she said. "So he strung me along, and I let him, I guess." Some of the others weren't too swell, either; one stole her underwear. And her Champagne flutes. But she seems remarkably sanguine about the entire endeavor. There is so much of the teacher about her, you can practically see her internal filing system for categorizing learning experiences.

Her humor, however, helps lighten the load. When asked whether she practiced safe sex, she said: "Well, not getting pregnant was part of my popularity," though she added: "Yes, we took the precautions we thought we needed to. After all, these men didn't know where I had been, either."

Although Ms. Juska has never published a book before, she has published articles on teaching, and for 20 years has been part of a writing group that meets monthly to read each other's work. It was when she was making piles of "yes," "no" and "maybe" with the responses to her ad that the idea of writing about it came to her. "I thought: `Jane, you don't want to forget this. It's too good to keep to yourself.' " she said. "I thought I'd write it as a novel because nobody would believe it. I took some vignettes to my group, and after I read them they were silent. I was terribly uncomfortable. Finally, there was a comment: `You changed point of view on Page 3.' They were just fumbling for things to say."

One of the men Ms. Juska met through the ad asked to see her pages. (In the book, all the men's names, occupations and home cities were changed to protect their identities, which Ms. Juska still refuses to divulge). She recalled: "After he read what I had written, he said, `There are two things you must do. Get out of that writing group and write it as nonfiction.' He gave me permission just to go."

Without any connections in publishing, Ms. Juska sent out the manuscript on her own. At the William Morris Agency, Elyse Green, a 26-year-old assistant, fell in love with it. "I didn't know agents had slush piles but they do," Ms. Juska said. Ms. Green passed the book to Virginia Barber, who became Ms. Juska's agent.

Ms. Juska sent her son the chapter she had written about his troubled youth and told him he could change his name if he wanted anonymity. He is now a forester, and though he eventually returned to school he has never shared his mother's love of words. "He said, `I would be proud if you used my real name,' " Ms. Juska said. But wasn't she worried about his reaction to the rest of the book? She laughed. "He said, `Oh, this is just another book I'm not going to read,' so I'm safe."

She finished her second glass of sauvignon blanc. "The best part of all this is that I have a writing life now," she said. She is working on a second book, about teaching. "The other huge surprise," she said, "was finding intellectual partners, which is almost as exciting as the sex, in some cases more. To be able to talk to a really smart man, who says, `I would value your opinion on this.' Where I grew up you had to bow and scrape to the nearest man and keep your mouth shut."

But it has been women, not men, whose responses to Ms. Juska's adventure have been the most harsh. "I did a reading in Berkeley for mostly women," Ms. Juska said. "I said that the age range of the men in the book went from 84 to 32. And one woman said about the 32-year-old, `He must have been short and ugly.' I said, `Actually, he's tall and handsome.' Another said, `Then what would he want with you?' She shrugged. "When women in particular hear about what I've done, the question which unbidden comes to them is, `What have I done with my life?' " she continued. "And lots of people at my age don't want to go back and look at it. That's why they're so nuts about their grandchildren. It keeps the focus off them."

Ms. Juska said she knows other women her age or older who have tried their luck online, at match.com. "One woman I know is just infuriated because she met this very nice man online who turned out to be 84 and he hadn't told her. I said she was ageist and she said she was only mad that he lied. And I said, `Come on now.' But most of the women insist on asking me, `Didn't you really do this because you wanted to get married?' Ms. Juska shook her head. "The institution of marriage does not interest me," she said firmly. "I did get a marriage proposal, but I said no. I'd have to give up the others, then. I'd have to give up too much."

Still, due to the luck of the draw, most of the men who interested Ms. Juska did not live in Berkeley or anywhere nearby. When she first placed the ad, she was so busy — teaching writing to prisoners at San Quentin, teaching an education seminar at a local college, volunteering at Planned Parenthood, hiking, singing in a chorale — it seemed incredible she had time or energy for anything else. But, as she writes, by 7 each evening she was home alone. "Yes, I was busy, but there's nobody touching you," she said. "People don't pay attention to that part."

And that lack of local company persists. For all her enterprise, on most days she still lives a solitary life. So does she feel cheated by her search, in the end? She hooted her no.

"I had no hope of it turning out to be anything like this," she said. "I expected to be murdered, or made sad at the very least. But I never expected to have intimate friendships with extraordinary men. True, I've met some men who are not kind or thoughtful, but I've also met men who are kind and thoughtful and funny and true." Her smile was wry. "Which is to say, I guess I found out that men are people."

She leaned over then to pick up her napkin and said something that was muffled. What was that? She sat up straight and spoke quite clearly. "They're just the kind of people I like better naked," she said.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

The Atlantic Monthly | May 2003

Hitler's Forgotten Library:
The Man, His Books, and His Search for God
You can tell a lot about a person from what he reads. The surviving—and largely ignored—remnants of Adolf Hitler's personal library reveal a deep but erratic interest in religion and theology

by Timothy W. Ryback
.....

D id you know that today is Hitler's birthday?" the attendant said as he handed me Adolf Hitler's personal copy of Mein Kampf, a tattered red-leather volume (a special second edition issued in 1926) with the title and author's name embossed in gold on the spine. The young man, clean-cut and dressed in a sweatshirt bearing the skull and crossbones of the Curry College Rugby Football Club, explained that he knew this fact only because his sister shared a birthday with the Nazi leader. "You remember something like that," he said.

On this particular Friday (April 20, 2001, Adolf Hitler's 112th birthday) the rare-book reading room of the Library of Congress—a high-ceilinged space elegantly appointed with brass lamps, heavy wooden tables, and thick carpet—hummed with subdued activity. At one table a heavy-set woman in a bright paisley blouse wore white gauze gloves to leaf through a fragile tome titled Histoire Aéronautique, a collection of quaint eighteenth-century lithographs depicting aeronauts in powdered wigs transported aloft by fanciful pneumatic contraptions. A smartly dressed black woman with cropped hair and large hoop earrings studied a book on slavery in Barbados. Across from her a stocky man with a laptop clattered away as he typed extracts from a book cradled in a velvet-lined wooden stand. At another table a young man in a suit stared into an oversized volume of black-and-white photographs of graphic sex—leather, chains, sprawled limbs—with SEX embossed on the silver-metal cover.

The rare-book collection is home to more than 800,000 volumes. It contains the personal libraries of Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, and first editions of contemporary "authors" such as Andy Warhol and Madonna. It is also home to the remnants of the private library of Adolf Hitler, a man better known for burning books than for collecting them.

The books that constitute the Hitler Library were discovered in a salt mine near Berchtesgaden—haphazardly stashed in schnapps crates with the Reich Chancellery address on them—by soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division in the spring of 1945. After a lengthy initial evaluation at the U.S. military "collecting point" in Munich the books, numbering 3,000, were shipped to the United States and transferred in January of 1952 to the Library of Congress, where an intern was assigned to uncrate the collection. "The intern did what we call 'duping out,'" says David Moore, a German-acquisition assistant at the Library of Congress. "If a book was not one hundred percent sure, if there was no bookplate, no inscription to the Führer, he didn't keep it." According to Moore, duplicate copies were sent to the exchange-and-gift division and then either went to other libraries or found their way onto the open market; the non-duplicate books that could not be fully authenticated were absorbed into the Library of Congress's general collection.

The 1,200 volumes that survived the "duping out" joined the rare-book collection on the third floor of the Jefferson Building, where they were unceremoniously identified by a large cardboard sign—dangling on a string from a ceiling pipe—that read, "Hitler Library. This bay only. Please replace books to proper location."

The sign has since been removed, the books relocated several times, and the collection euphemistically renamed the Third Reich Collection. The books can be ordered, five at a time, from the main desk in the rare-book reading room. When I first visited the collection, in April of 2001, fewer than half of the 1,200 books had Library of Congress numbers, and only 200 of those were listed in the online catalogue; the remaining thousand titles were listed alphabetically by author on yellowing cards in an old-fashioned wooden card catalogue, many still identified by the provisional numbers assigned them in the early 1950s. Jerry Wager, the head of the rare-book reading room, told me at the time, "Processing this collection has not been a high priority for us"; he also said that the books had been relocated yet again in recent months. "We routinely move collections to make better use of existing space and to accommodate new acquisitions," he said. A genteel man in his mid-fifties with a flawlessly manicured white beard, Wager is a master of discretion. When I asked about the Hitler collection's new location, he replied, "For security reasons we don't reveal where collections are located in the vault." He is equally circumspect about scholars who have previously studied the collection, simply noting that the books are requested only a few times each year, and generally by people looking for specific volumes rather than for an opportunity to study the collection as a whole.

Why, with hundreds of Hitler biographies, had not more scholars visited the Third Reich Collection? It is referenced by none of the leading Hitler biographers—not Alan Bullock, not John Toland, not Joachim Fest. Ian Kershaw, whose recent two-volume Hitler biography has won international acclaim, told me in the summer of 2001 that he visited the collection once, in the early 1990s, but "decided against any consultation of the volumes in it, and in the event did not refer directly, so far as I recall, to the collection in my biography." In retrospect, Kershaw concedes, he should probably have at least mentioned the collection in a footnote.

cholarly neglect of the Hitler Library derives in good part from an early misperception that its historical or biographical importance was limited. "Spotchecks revealed little in the way of marginal notes, autographs, or other similar features of interest," an internal Library of Congress review determined in January of 1952. "Indeed, it seems that most of the books have never been perused by their owner." Gerhard Weinberg, a leading authority on the Nazi era and one of the first scholars to explore the collection, confirms this initial assessment. "I was a newly minted Ph.D., and this was my first job beyond graduate school," Weinberg told me not long ago. "I was compiling information for the Guide to Captured German War Documents. The books had only recently been uncrated, and I was intrigued by what I would find there." To Weinberg's disappointment, the Hitler Library appeared to consist mostly of presentation copies from authors or publishers. "There were few clues that many of these books had been part of his personal library, and even less evidence that he had read any of them," Weinberg says.

In 2000 Philipp Gassert and Daniel Mattern reached a similar conclusion. Beginning in 1995 Gassert, an assistant professor of history at the University of Heidelberg, and Mattern, the senior editor at the German Historical Institute, in Washington, D.C., systematically reviewed every volume in the collection. In the spring of 2001 Greenwood Press published the results of their research, The Hitler Library, a 550-page bibliography that lists each book alphabetically, with its author, page count, and call number. Also included are transcriptions of all handwritten dedications, some brief descriptions of marginalia, and an indication of which books contain the Führer's bookplate—an eagle, a swastika, and oak branches between the words EX LIBRIS and ADOLF HITLER.

The Hitler Library provides the first comprehensive road map through the collection, but at times it leads readers astray.

Most significant is overlooked marginalia. In one reference Mattern and Gassert note correctly that the Hitler Library contains two identical copies of Paul de Lagarde's German Essays, but they don't mention marginalia, despite the fact that in one volume fifty-eight pages have penciled intrusions—the first on page 16, the last on page 370. Given that Lagarde belongs to a circle of nineteenth-century German nationalist writers who are believed to have had a formative influence on Hitler's anti-Semitism, the marked passages are certainly worth noting. In an essay called "The Current Tasks of German Politics," Lagarde anticipates the emergence of a "singular man with the abilities and energy" to unite the German peoples, and calls for the "relocation of the Polish and Austrian Jews to Palestine." This latter phrase has been underlined and flagged with two bold strikes in the margin.

Sometimes writing along the side of a page is recognizably in Hitler's jagged cursive hand. For the most part, though, the marginalia are restricted to simple markings whose common "authorship" is suggested by an intense vertical line in the margin and double or triple underlining in the text, always in pencil; I found such markings repeatedly both in the Library of Congress collection and in a cache of eighty Hitler books at Brown University. Hitler's handwritten speeches, preserved in the Federal German Archives, show an identical pattern of markings. In one anti-Semitic rant Hitler drew three lines under the words Klassenkampf ("class struggle"), Weltherrschaft ("world domination"), and Der Jude als Diktator ("the Jew as dictator"); one can almost hear his fevered tones.

Hitler's habit of highlighting key concepts and passages is consonant with his theory on the "art of reading." In Chapter Two of Mein Kampf he observed,
A man who possesses the art of correct reading will, in studying any book, magazine, or pamphlet, instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth knowing ... Then, if life suddenly sets some question before us for examination or answer, the memory, if this method of reading is observed ... will derive all the individual items regarding these questions, assembled in the course of decades, [and] submit them to the mind for examination and reconsideration, until the question is clarified or answered.
In these marginalia one sees a man (who famously seemed never to listen to anyone, for whom "conversation" was little more than a torrent of monologues) reading passages, reflecting on them, and responding with penciled dashes, dots, question marks, exclamation points, and underscorings—intellectual footprints across the page. Here is one of history's most complex figures reduced merely to a reader with a book and a pencil.

ooks, books, always books!" August Kubizek once wrote. "I just can't imagine Adolf without books. He had them piled up around him at home. He always had a book with him wherever he went." Kubizek, Hitler's only real friend in his teenage years, recalled after the war that Hitler had been registered with three libraries in Linz, where he attended school, and had passed endless days in the baroque splendor of the Hofbibliothek, the former court library of the Hapsburgs, during his time in Vienna. "Bücher waren seine Welt," Kubizek wrote. "Books were his world."

Though Kubizek's reminiscences, first published in the 1950s, are in many ways suspect, his depiction of the future Führer as a bibliophile has been amply corroborated. One of Hitler's first cousins, Johann Schmidt, recounted for a Nazi Party history of the Führer that when Hitler spent summers with relatives in the tiny Waldviertel hamlet of Spital, he invariably arrived with "lots of books in which he was constantly busy reading and working." Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer and the "governor" of Nazi-occupied Poland, recalled before his 1946 execution at Nuremberg that Hitler carried a copy of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation with him throughout World War I. During his incarceration after the failed 1923 Munich putsch, Hitler was regularly supplied with reading materials by friends and associates. He once referred to his time in Landsberg Prison as his "university paid for by the state." During a bout of prison blues in December of 1924 he received a package from Winifred Wagner, the daughter-in-law of the composer Richard Wagner and one of the few people who addressed Hitler with the familiar du. It contained a book of Goethe's poetry from the Wagner family library. The 358-page volume, now at the Library of Congress, contains meditative classics such as "Across All Peaks" and "Evening Song," accompanied by handsome full-page pen-and-ink drawings. The inside cover bears a handwritten inscription: "Adolf Hitler, this picture book taken from the book garden of Eva Chamberlain, for your enjoyment in serious lonely hours! Bayreuth, Christmas 1924."

Books seem to have been the gift of choice for Hitler on virtually every occasion. The Hitler Library contains scores of books bearing inscriptions for Christmas, his birthday, and other festive occasions. A book titled Death and Immortality in the World View of Indo-Germanic Thinkers is inscribed for Hitler by the SS chief Heinrich Himmler on the occasion of "Julfest 1938"—Nazi circumlocution for Christmas. I also discovered books from the controversial filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl—two on the Berlin Olympics and an eight-volume set of the complete works of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte in a rare first edition. Given that Hitler had charged Riefenstahl with filming the Olympic Games, the presence of the first two volumes was understandable; the Fichte was more puzzling.

When I called on Riefenstahl, who lives outside Munich and had just marked her hundredth birthday, she referred me to her published memoirs, in which she devotes a chapter to the Fichte volumes. According to that account, in the spring of 1933 the thirty-year-old filmmaker approached Hitler about the plight of several Jewish friends. "I have great esteem for you as an artist, you have a rare talent," Hitler replied, according to Riefenstahl. "But I cannot discuss the Jewish problem with you." Mortified by his rebuke (Riefenstahl says she felt herself go faint), she later sought to make amends by sending Hitler the Fichte. Bound in white leather with gold embossing, the books bear the inscription "Meinem lieben Führer in tiefster Verehrung ['To my dear Führer with deepest admiration'], Leni Riefenstahl."

Fed by gifts and his own acquisitions, Hitler's library swelled dramatically in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In his 1925 tax declaration Hitler listed his total personal assets at a paltry 1,000 marks, and claimed "no property" other than "a writing table and two bookcases with books." By 1930, however, as sales of Mein Kampf bolstered his income, book buying represented his third largest tax deduction (after general travel and transportation): 1,692 marks in 1930, with similar deductions in the two years following. More telling still is the five-year insurance policy Hitler took out in October of 1934, with the Gladbacher Fire Insurance Company, on his six-room apartment on the Prinzregentenplatz, in downtown Munich. In the letter of agreement accompanying the policy Hitler valued his book collection, said to consist of 6,000 volumes, at 150,000 marks—half the value of the entire policy. The other half represented his art holdings.

By the late 1930s Hitler had three separate libraries for his ever-expanding collection. At his apartment he removed a wall between two rooms and installed bookshelves. For the Berghof, his Alpine retreat near Berchtesgaden, Hitler built a second-floor study with handmade bookcases; color photographs of the finished space show an elegant setting with Oriental carpets, two globes, and bookcases fitted with glass doors and brass locks. Herbert Döhring, who managed the Berghof from 1936 to 1943, told me that the library could accommodate no more than 500 or 600 volumes. "He reserved this space for the books he really cared about," says Döhring, who helped Hitler to sort the books. "He used to have me send the rest to a storage facility in Munich or to the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin." For his official Berlin residence Hitler had his architect, Albert Speer, design a vast library that occupied the entire west wing. "Inventory records of the Reich Chancellery that we found at the Hoover Institution at Stanford suggest that by the early 1940s Hitler was receiving as many as four thousand books annually," Daniel Mattern told me. In Munich, Gassert and Mattern also discovered architectural sketches for a library annex to the Berghof that was intended to accommodate more than 60,000 volumes. "This was a man with a lot of books," Mattern says.

nfortunately, Hitler never inventoried his books, and the only detailed accounting of his libraries comes courtesy of the former United Press correspondent Frederick Oechsner, who met Hitler repeatedly and was evidently able to acquaint himself intimately with the Führer's book collections. "I found that his personal library, which is divided between his residence in the Chancellery in Berlin and his country home on the Obersalzberg at Berchtesgaden, contains roughly 16,300 books," Oechsner wrote in his best-selling book This Is the Enemy (1942).

According to Oechsner, the biggest single share of Hitler's library, some 7,000 books, was devoted to military matters, in particular "the campaigns of Napoleon, the Prussian kings; the lives of all German and Prussian potentates who ever played a military role; and books on virtually all the well-known military campaigns in recorded history." Another 1,500 volumes concerned architecture, theater, painting, and sculpture. "One book on the Spanish theater has pornographic drawings and photographs, but there is no section on pornography, as such, in Hitler's Library," Oechsner wrote. The balance of the collection consisted of clusters of books on diverse themes ranging from nutrition and health to religion and geography, with "eight hundred to a thousand books" of "simple, popular fiction, many of them pure trash in anybody's language."

By his own admission, Hitler was not a big fan of novels, though he once ranked Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Don Quixote (he had a special affection for the edition illustrated by Gustave Doré) among the world's greatest works of literature. The one novelist we know Hitler loved and read was Karl May, a German writer of cheap American-style westerns. In the spring of 1933, just months after the Nazis seized power, Oskar Achenbach, a Munich-based journalist, toured the Berghof—in the Führer's absence—and discovered a shelf of Karl May novels at Hitler's bedside. "The bedroom of the Führer is of spartan simplicity," Achenbach reported in the Sonntag Morgenpost. "Brass bed, closet, toiletries, a few chairs, those are all the furnishings. On a bookshelf are works on politics and diplomacy, a few brochures and books on the care of German shepherds, and then—pay attention you German boys! Then comes an entire row of books by—Karl May! Winnetou, Old Surehand, Bad Guy, all our dear old friends." During the war Hitler reportedly admonished his generals for their lack of imagination and recommended that they all read Karl May. Albert Speer recounted in his Spandau diaries,
Hitler was wont to say that he had always been deeply impressed by the tactical finesse and circumspection that Karl May conferred upon his character Winnetou ... And he would add that during his reading hours at night, when faced by seemingly hopeless situations, he would still reach for those stories, that they gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for elderly people.
No one knows the exact extent of Hitler's library. Though Oechsner estimated the original collection at 16,000 volumes, Gassert and Mattern assert that it is impossible to determine the actual dimensions, especially since the majority of the books were either burned or plundered in the final weeks of the war—an assumption confirmed in part by Florian Beierl, the head of the Archive for the Contemporary History of the Obersalzberg, in Berchtesgaden. According to Beierl, Hitler's Berghof experienced successive waves of looters: first local residents, then French and American soldiers, and eventually members of the U.S. Senate. Beierl showed me archival film footage (taken by the legendary World War II photographer Walter Rosenblum) of a delegation of American senators—Burton Wheeler, Homer Capehart, and Ernest McFarland—emerging from the Berghof ruins with books under their arms. "I doubt if they were taking them to the Library of Congress," Beierl said.

I have also been told that a portion of the Hitler Library may have been seized by the Red Army. "Stalin was so paranoid about Hitler that he sent trophy brigades to search for anything connected with him," says Konstantin Akinsha, a former researcher for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States. "His skull, his uniforms, Eva Braun's dresses, her underwear—they are all in Moscow." Akinsha told me recently that in the early 1990s he heard rumors about a depository in an abandoned church in Uzkoe, a suburb of Moscow, that allegedly contained a huge quantity of "trophy books," including some that had belonged to Hitler.

Grigory Kozlov, another "trophy" sleuth, confirms that a "secret depository" did indeed exist in Uzkoe for more than four decades, with tens of thousands of books stacked from floor to ceiling. "At the beginning of 1995 there was a big discussion about trophy books," Kozlov told me. "They decided to remove these books from Uzkoe and destroy all traces that showed there had been some sort of secret depository there." Now, he says, the books have been dispersed anonymously in libraries and archives across Russia. "I don't know what's true or not," Kozlov told me. "Books were evacuated without records, confiscated without records. I don't know if anyone is ready to talk."

he 1,200 of Hitler's books in the Library of Congress most likely represent less than 10 percent of the original collection. Nevertheless, when I first visited the Hitler Library, in April of 2001, I was surprised to discover that despite the incompleteness of the collection, I could easily discern the collector preserved within his books. In more than 200 World War I memoirs, including Ernst Jünger's Fire and Blood, with a personal inscription to "the Führer," I encountered Hitler the "Austrian corporal," with his bushy moustache, his somber demeanor, and his battlefield service, during which he was twice wounded and for which he was twice decorated, once with the Iron Cross first class.

In two olive-drab paperbacks, guidebooks to the cultural monuments of Brussels and Berlin, published by Seemann Verlag and costing three marks each, I glimpsed Hitler the aspiring Frontsoldat-cum-artist. The Berlin guide has Hitler's signature in faded purple ink on the inside front cover, with the place and month of purchase: "Fournes, 22 November 1915." In the Brussels guide Hitler simply scrawled "A. Hitler" in pencil; the last three letters trail downward like unspooling ribbon. A chapter on Frederick the Great is especially worn, its pages tattered, marked with fingerprints, and smeared with red candle wax. Tucked in the crease between pages 162 and 163 I found a three-quarter-inch strand of stiff black hair.

In dozens of books, with salutations from the likes of Prince August Wilhelm—son of the last German Kaiser—and the heirs of the Bechstein piano dynasty, I saw Hitler the protégé of Germany's financial, social, and cultural elite. One book on Führertum—"leadership"—was presented to Hitler by the industrialist Fritz Thyssen, who had introduced him to some of Germany's leading businessmen at a decisive meeting in Düsseldorf in January of 1932. "To the Führer, Adolf Hitler, in memory of his presentation to the Düsseldorf Industrial Club," Thyssen wrote on the inside cover. Several books are inscribed to Hitler from Richard Wagner's youngest daughter, Eva, who had married Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Chamberlain was an anti-Semitic Englishman best known for his book The Foundations of the 19th Century, in which he advanced the thesis that Jesus was of Aryan rather than Semitic blood. Hitler read Chamberlain during his Vienna period, and had a brief audience with the aging anti-Semite at the Wagner estate shortly before being sent to Landsberg Prison. "You know Goethe's differentiation between force and force," Chamberlain wrote Hitler in October of 1923. "There is force which comes from chaos and leads to chaos, and there is force which is destined to create a new world." Chamberlain credited Hitler with the latter.

In a French vegetarian cookbook with an inscription from its author, Maïa Charpentier, I encountered Monsieur Hitler végétarien. And I found hints of Hitler the future mass murderer in a 1932 technical treatise on chemical warfare that explores the varying qualities of poison gas, from chlorine to prussic acid (Blausäure). The latter was produced commercially as Zyklon B, which would be notorious for its use in the Nazi extermination camps.

I also found, however, a Hitler I had not anticipated: a man with a sustained interest in spirituality. Among the piles of Nazi tripe (much of it printed on high-acid paper that is rapidly deteriorating) are more than 130 books on religious and spiritual subjects, ranging from Occidental occultism to Eastern mysticism to the teachings of Jesus Christ—books with titles such as Sunday Meditations; On Prayer; A Primer for Religious Questions, Large and Small; Large Truths About Mankind, the World and God. Also included were a German translation of E. Stanley Jones's 1931 best seller, The Christ of the Mount; and a 500-page work on the life and teachings of Jesus, published in 1935 under the title The Son: The Evangelical Sources and Pronouncements of Jesus of Nazareth in Their Original Form and With the Jewish Influences. Some volumes date from the early 1920s, when Hitler was an obscure rabble-rouser on the fringe of Munich political life; others from his last years, when he dominated Europe.

One leather-bound tome—with WORTE CHRISTI, or "Words of Christ," embossed in gold on the cover—was well worn, the silky, supple leather peeling upward in gentle curls along the edges. Human hands had obviously spent a lot of time with this book. The inside cover bore a dedication: "To our beloved Führer with gratitude and profound respect, Clara von Behl, born von Jansen von den Osten. Christmas 1935."

Worte Christi was so fragile that when the attendant brought it to me, he placed it on a red-velvet pad in a wooden reading stand, a beautifully finished oak contraption with two supports that could be adjusted with small brass pegs to fit the dimensions of the book. No more than a foot wide and eighteen inches long, the stand had a sacred air, as if it belonged on an altar.

I reviewed the table of contents—"Belief and Prayer," "God and the Kingdom of God," "Priests and Their Religious Practices," "The World and Its People"—and skimmed the introduction; then I scanned the book for marginalia that might suggest a close study of the text. A white-silk bookmark, preserved in its original perfection between pages 22 and 23 (only the portion exposed to the air had deteriorated), lay across a description of the Last Supper as related by Saint John. A series of pages that followed contained only a single aphorism each: "Believe in God" (page 31), "Have no fear, just believe" (page 52), "If you believe, anything is possible" (page 53), and so on, all the way to page 95, which offers the solemn wisdom "Many are called but few are chosen."

On page 241 appears the passage "You should love God, your Lord, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your spirit: this is the foremost and greatest commandment. Another is equally important: Love your neighbor as you would love yourself." Beside this passage is one brief penciled line, the only mark in the entire book.

Given Hitler's legendary disdain for organized religion in general and Christianity in particular, I didn't expect him to have devoted much time to the teachings of Christ, let alone to have marked this quintessential Christian virtue. Had this in fact been made by the pencil of Hitler's younger sister, Paula, who occasionally visited her brother at the Berghof and remained a devout Catholic until her dying day? Might some other Berghof guest have responded to this holy Scripture?

Possibly—but though most of the spiritually oriented books in the Hitler Library were gifts sent to the Führer by distant admirers, several, like Worte Christi, were obviously well read, and some contained marginalia in Hitler's hand that suggested a serious exploration of spiritual matters. If Hitler was as deeply engaged with spiritual issues as his books and their marginalia suggest, then what was the purpose of this pursuit?

n the spring of 1943, while the outcome of World War II hung in the balance, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services—forerunner to the CIA—commissioned Walter Langer, a Boston-based psychoanalyst, to develop a "psychological profile" of Adolf Hitler. As Langer later recalled, this was the first time the U.S. government had attempted to psychoanalyze a world leader in order to determine "the things that make him tick."

Over the course of eight months, assisted by three field researchers and advised by three other experts in psychology, Langer compiled more than a thousand typewritten, single-spaced pages of material on his "patient": texts from speeches, excerpts from Mein Kampf, interviews with former Hitler associates, and virtually every printed source available. Langer wrote,
A survey of all the evidence forces us to conclude that Hitler believes himself destined to become an Immortal Hitler, chosen by God to be the New Deliverer of Germany and the Founder of a new social order for the world. He firmly believes this and is certain that in spite of all the trials and tribulations through which he must pass he will finally attain that goal. The one condition is that he follow the dictates of the inner voice that have guided and protected him in the past.
In his summary Langer outlined eight possible scenarios for Hitler's course of action in the face of defeat. The most likely scenario, he suggested in a prescient moment, was that Hitler's belief in divine protection would compel him to fight to the bitter end, "drag[ging] a world with us—a world in flames," and that ultimately he would take his own life.

Langer based his assessment not only on Hitler's repeated references to "divine providence," both in speeches and in private conversations, but also on reports from some of Hitler's most intimate associates that Hitler truly believed he was "predestined" for greatness and inspired by "divine powers." After the war Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, one of Hitler's chief military advisers, seemed to confirm the Langer thesis. "Looking back," he said, "I am inclined to think he was literally obsessed with the idea of some miraculous salvation, that he clung to it like a drowning man to a straw."

Experts since then have been of two minds on the matter of Hitler's spiritual beliefs. Ian Kershaw argues that Hitler consciously constructed an image of himself as a messianic figure, and eventually came to believe the very myth he had helped to fashion. "The more he succumbed to the allure of his own Führer cult and came to believe in his own myth, the more his judgment became impaired by faith in his own infallibility," Kershaw writes in The Hitler Myth (1987). But believing in a messianic myth is not the same as believing in God. When I asked Kershaw in 2001 whether he thought Hitler actually believed in divine providence, he dismissed the notion. "I don't think that he had any real belief in a deity of any sort, only in himself as a 'man of destiny' who would bring about Germany's 'salvation,'" he declared. Gerhard Weinberg, who helped sort through the Hitler Library back in the 1950s, likewise dismisses the notion of Hitler as a religious believer, insisting that he was driven by the twin passions of Blut und Boden—racial purity and territorial expansion. "He didn't believe in anything but himself," Weinberg told me last summer. Most historians tend to agree.

Some non-historians, however, have different views. In the 1960s Friedrich Heer, a prominent and controversial Viennese theologian, identified Hitler as a misguided "Austrian Catholic," a man whose faith was disastrously misplaced but nevertheless sincere. In a dense, 750-page treatise Heer saw Hitler the Austrian Catholic at every turn: the nine-year-old choirboy catching his first glimpse of a swastika in the coat of arms at the Lambach Monastery; the beer-hall orator whose speeches resound with biblical allusions; the Führer of the Reich who re-created the splendor of the Catholic mass at the annual Nuremberg rally. Even his virulent hatred of Jewry found sustenance in those roots. Fritz Redlich, an eminent Yale psychiatrist, asserts in his book, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet, that Hitler acted from a profound belief in God. Noting Hitler's own words "Man kommt um den Gottesbegriff nicht um" ("You cannot get around the concept of God"), Redlich told me last summer that he was certain Hitler believed in a "divine creature." He rejected suggestions that Hitler's invocations of the divine were little more than cynical public posturing and insisted that we ought to take Hitler at his word: "In a way, Hitler was a terrible liar, but he was a tactical liar. In his essential line of thinking he was honest."

Traudl Junge, Hitler's former secretary, would not go so far as to say that Hitler believed in God, but she did believe that Hitler's repeated references to the divine were more than just for show. Junge—who died of cancer in February of last year—told me the previous summer that Hitler spoke of such things in private as well as in public. After two and a half years of daily contact with Hitler, she was convinced that he believed in some form of divine protection, especially after surviving a dramatic assassination attempt in 1944. "After the July 1944 attack," she told me, "I believe he felt himself to be an instrument of providence, and believed he had a mission to fulfill."

n my hands I hold a book about Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French mystic whose predictions of epic calamities have fascinated generations, and whose stanza "From poor people a child will be born/ who with his tongue will seduce many people" has been interpreted as prophesying the rise of Adolf Hitler. Printed on high-acid paper, this volume, with its 137 brittle, crumbling pages, bears a publication date of 1921 but feels centuries older. The book promises to "decypher and reveal for the first time the prophesies on the future of Europe and the rise and fall of France from 1555 to 2200." Its final pages offer additional mystical edification in a series of advertisements for related texts: Memoirs of a Spiritualist, The Wandering Soul, How Can I Protect Myself From Suggestion and Hypnosis?, Soul and Cosmos, The Realm of the Invisible, and Human Destiny and the Course of the Stars. Pasted inside this moldering volume is one of Adolf Hitler's bookplates.

The Predictions of Nostradamus belongs to a cache of occult books that Hitler acquired in the early 1920s and that were discovered in the private quarters of his Berlin bunker by Colonel Albert Aronson in May of 1945. As part of the Allied occupation forces, Aronson was among the first Americans to enter Berlin after the collapse of the Nazi resistance. "When my uncle arrived, the Russians took him on a tour of Hitler's bunker," one of Aronson's nephews recalls. "He said that the Russians had pretty much picked the place clean, but there were some pictures and a pile of books they let him take." According to the nephew, the books remained in Aronson's attic until his death, at which point they were bequeathed to his nephew, who donated them to Brown University in 1979.

Today the eighty volumes are housed in the basement vault of Brown's rare-book collection at the John Hay Library, where they share shelf space with Walt Whitman's personal copy of a first edition of Leaves of Grass and John James Audubon's original folios of Birds of America. According to Samuel Streit, the associate librarian for special collections, the Hitler books have attracted virtually no attention from scholars. Streit himself has examined the collection only once, and his most vivid recollection was the Hitler bookplate. "I know this sounds strange," says Streit, an amiable man in his mid-fifties, "but from the standpoint of bookplate design, it is quite tastefully done."

Like the Library of Congress collection, Brown's eighty Hitler books constitute a hodgepodge: picture books, art journals, an Italian libretto of Wagner's Walküre, a 1937 edition of Mein Kampf, and two editions of Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century. The more than a dozen books on the occult include several devoted to Nordic runes, among them a 1922 history of the swastika, richly illustrated with nearly 500 diverse renderings—in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Greek pottery, Mayan temples, and Christian crosses. The Dead Are Alive delivers "incontrovertible evidence on occultism, somnambulism, spiritualism, with sixteen photographs of ghosts." Among the photographic images that fill the final pages of the volume is one of five people levitating a table at an 1892 séance in Genoa and another allegedly showing the ghost of a fifteen-year-old Polish girl, Stasia, being consumed by a "luminous, misty substance." A picture of a rather stately-looking Englishman is captioned "The Phantom of the English writer Charles Dickens who died in 1871 and is buried in Westminster Abbey. He appeared in 1873 and was photographed."

The canon of Hitler historiography declares that Hitler flirted with occultism in the early 1920s, and that he recruited some of his closest ideological lieutenants—Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann, Alfred Rosenberg, and Heinrich Himmler—from the Thule Society and similar Nordic cults. "When I first knew Adolf Hitler in Munich, in 1921 and 1922, he was in touch with a circle that believed firmly in the portents of the stars," Karl Wiegand, a former Hitler associate, recalled in an article for Cosmopolitan in 1939.
"There was much whispering about the coming of 'another Charlemagne and a new Reich.' How far Hitler believed in these astrological forecasts and prophesies in those days I never could get out of the Führer. He neither denied nor affirmed belief. He was not averse, however, to making use of the forecasts to advance popular faith in himself and his then young and struggling movement."
Most scholars dismiss the notion that Hitler seriously entertained the ideas of these cults, but the marginalia in several of his books confirm at least an intellectual engagement in the substance of Weimar-era occultism. The Brown collection contains books by such figures as Adamant Rohm, a "magnetopathic doctor" from Wiesbaden; Carl Ludwig Schleich, a Berlin physician who pioneered the use of local anesthesia; and Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, who wrote numerous books on reincarnation and otherworldly phenomena under the pseudonym Bô Yin Râ.

One of the most heavily marked books is Magic: History, Theory and Practice (1923), by Ernst Schertel. When I typed the author's name into one Internet search engine, I scored eight hits, including sites on Satanism, eroticism, sadomasochism, and flagellation. When I typed his name into Google, I scored twenty-six hits, including sites on parapsychology, astrology, and diverse sexual practices. According to a Web site for Germany's sadomasochistic community, Schertel wrote numerous books on flagellation and eroticism, and was "a central figure" in the German nudist movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

Hitler's copy of Magic bears a handwritten dedication from Schertel, scrawled on the title page in pencil. A 170-page softcover in large format, the book has been thoroughly read, and its margins scored repeatedly. I found a particularly thick pencil line beside the passage "He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world."

ne of the oldest volumes of literature still in the Hitler Library is a 1917 German edition of Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen's epic of a "Nordic Faust" who cuts a swath of human suffering—betraying friends, abandoning women, trading in slaves, and committing cold-blooded murder—on his way to becoming "emperor of the whole world." When challenged to account for his sundry trespasses, Gynt declares that he would rather burn in hell for excessive sins than simmer in obscurity with the rest of humanity. Edvard Grieg set this cruel play to beautiful music. Hitler's copy of Peer Gynt—handsomely illustrated by Otto Sager—bears a simple inscription by its German translator: "Intended for his dear friend Adolf Hitler. Dietrich Eckart. Munich, October 22, 1921."

Few people could call Hitler "Freund," and fewer still "lieber Freund." For Hitler, Eckart was both friend and family, a mentor and a father figure. When the two men first met, late in 1919, Hitler was a thirty-year-old political upstart a little more than a year out of the trenches, without a penny to his name. Eckart was a fifty-one-year-old playwright with a runaway hit (his adaptation of Peer Gynt), a paintbrush moustache, a morphine addiction, and a legendary hatred of Jews; one Munich newspaper described him as a "raging anti-Semite" who would "ideally like to consume a half dozen Jews daily with his sauerkraut." After working with Hitler at an early Nazi Party event, Eckart began grooming him for political life. He bought Hitler his first trench coat, gave him instruction in public speaking, and introduced him to members of Munich society, often with the icebreaker "This is the man who will one day liberate Germany." Hitler once called Eckart the "polar star" of the Nazi movement, and dedicated the first volume of Mein Kampf to him. "Follow Hitler!" Eckart allegedly exhorted on his deathbed, in 1923. "He will dance, but the music to which he dances was composed by me."

For all the vitriol Hitler spewed upon Judaism, he came to hold Christianity in equal disdain. "Christianity is the worst thing that ever happened to mankind," he declared during an after-dinner rant in July of 1941. "Bolshevism is the illegitimate child of Christianity. Both are an outgrowth of the Jew."

Hitler was the classic apostate. He rebelled against the established theology in which he was born and bred, all the while seeking to fill the resulting spiritual void. As the Hitler Library suggests, he found no shortage of latter-day prophets peddling alternative theologies. Mathilde von Kemnitz, the wife of Erich Ludendorff, the venerated World War I general who joined Hitler in the Munich putsch, promoted a neo-Teutonic pagan cult that called for the destruction of churches and the creation of forest temples and places of sacrifice. A 1922 volume of her writings, Triumph of the Will to Immortality, bears a bizarre and cryptic inscription to Hitler.
Now don't forget you young, blessed soul,
If you never leave the afterlife
You will thus be a perfect God
For as long as you live.
Hitler tolerated Kemnitz's neo-pagan looniness until Ludendorff's death, in December of 1937. In the autumn of 1939 the Nazi government, invoking wartime rationing, terminated paper supplies for Kemnitz's publication At the Holy Well (Am Heiligen Quell), effectively silencing her movement. Kemnitz, who survived the war, never forgave Hitler the betrayal.

Guida Diehl, a prolific Weimar writer who fancied herself the "female Führer," showered Hitler with titles, including Burn! Holy Flame! and The Will of the German Woman. In a handbook on how to conduct a German Christmas in "times of need and struggle," Diehl wrote to Hitler, "We struggle for the German soul, which fashioned the German Christmas from Christ himself! Sieg heil!" There is no indication that Hitler ever opened, let alone read, any of Diehl's books.

Unquestionably the most significant unread volume in the Hitler collection is a 1940 edition of Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the Nazi classic that, with more than a million copies in print at the time, was second only to Mein Kampf for the Nazi movement. In the course of its 800 pages Rosenberg delivered the theological framework for a National German Church intended to subsume "the best of the protestant and catholic churches" and eliminate the "Jew-infested Old Testament." Denouncing the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as a "counterfeit of the great image of Christ," Rosenberg envisioned a "fifth gospel" depicting Jesus as an Aryan superman—"The powerful preacher and the raging prophet in the temple, the man who inspired, and whom everyone followed, not the sacrificial lamb of the Jewish prophets, not the man on the cross."

This particular edition of Rosenberg's legendary anti-Semitic screed has a handsome dark-blue linen cover and contains a full-page black-and-white photograph of Rosenberg standing before a shelf of leather-bound books. Dressed in a three-piece suit, he looks more like a Boston banker than the ideological fanatic who wrote some of the most offensive and impenetrable prose of the Nazi era before being hanged in Nuremberg in 1946. The book bears the Hitler bookplate but is in mint condition; the binding cracked when I opened the cover.

Despite Rosenberg's repeated attempts to establish his Myth as official party doctrine, Hitler insisted that the book was a "private publication" that represented Rosenberg's personal opinions. In conversations Hitler admitted that he had read only "small portions" of it and described it as unreadable. Joseph Goebbels concurred, calling The Myth an "intellectual belch."

Hitler's selective reading—or nonreading—of the pseudo-theological texts in his library makes those books he did read, and especially those in which he left marginalia, all the more significant. Here is where the Hitler Library is most useful. In the Fichte volumes given to him by Riefenstahl, I encountered a veritable blizzard of underlines, question marks, exclamation points, and marginal strikes that sweeps across a hundred printed pages of dense theological prose. Where Fichte peeled away the spiritual trappings of the Holy Trinity, positing the Father as "a natural universal force," the Son as the "physical embodiment of this force," and the Holy Ghost as an expression of the "light of reason," Hitler not only underlined the entire passage but placed a thick vertical line in the margin, and added an exclamation point for good measure.

As I traced the penciled notations, I realized that Hitler was seeking a path to the divine that led to just one place. Fichte asked, "Where did Jesus derive the power that has held his followers for all eternity?" Hitler drew a dense line beneath the answer: "Through his absolute identification with God." At another point Hitler highlighted a brief but revealing paragraph: "God and I are One. Expressed simply in two identical sentences—His life is mine; my life is his. My work is his work, and his work my work."

Among the numerous volumes dealing with the spiritual, the mystical, and the occult I found a typewritten manuscript that could well have served as a blueprint for Hitler's theology. This bound 230-page treatise is titled The Law of the World: The Coming Religion and was written by a Munich resident named Maximilian Riedel. During the first week of August 1939 the manuscript was hand-delivered to Anni Winter, Hitler's longtime Munich housekeeper, with the request that it be passed to Hitler personally. An accompanying letter read,
Mein Führer!

Based on a new discovery I have been able to prove, with incontrovertible scientific evidence, the concept of the trinity of God as a natural law. One of the results of this discovery is, among other things, the seamless relationship between the terms: Truth-Law-Duty-Honor. In essence, the origins of all science, philosophy and religion. The significance of this discovery has led me to ask Frau Winter to hand to you personally the enclosed manuscript.

Heil mein Führer!
Max Riedel
Grünwald
Oberhachingerweg 1
Riedel made a smart tactical move in delivering his manuscript to Hitler's Munich residence. Whereas at the Berghof, Hitler received hundreds of books, and at the Reich Chancellery all such correspondence went through secretaries' hands, in Munich the only filter was Hitler's housekeeper. Based on the marginalia, it seems that Hitler not only received the Riedel manuscript but also read it carefully with pencil in hand. Individual sentences and entire paragraphs are underlined, sometimes twice or even three times.

In this densely written treatise Riedel established the groundwork for his "new religion," replacing the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost with a new tripartite unity, the "Körper, Geist und Seele"—"body, mind, and soul." Riedel argued that traditionally mankind has recognized five senses, which relate only to the physical aspects of our existence, and that this hinders our ability to perceive the true nature of our relationship to God and the universe. He offered seven additional "senses" that every human being possesses, which are related to the subjective perception of the world; among them Riedel included our inherent sense of what is right and wrong, our emotional sense of another person, our sense of self-preservation. On a two-page centerfold he illustrated his theory with a circular diagram in which various concepts—"soul," "space," "reality," "present," "past," "possibility," "transformation," "culture," "afterlife," "humanity," "infinity"—are connected by a spider web of lines. "The body, mind and soul do not belong to the individual, they belong to the universe," the author explained.

Riedel's "trinity" seems to have attracted Hitler's particular attention. A dense penciled line parallels the following passage: "The problem with being objective is that we use objective criteria as the basis for human understanding in general, which means that the objective criteria, that is, the rational criteria, end up serving as the basis for all human understanding, perception and decision-making." By using the five traditional senses to achieve this "objectivity," Riedel declared, human beings exclude the possibility of perceiving—through the additional seven senses he identified—the deeper forces of the world, and are thus unable to achieve that unity of body, mind, and soul. "The human mind never decides things on its own, it is the result of a discourse between the body and the soul," he claimed.

The sentence not only caught Hitler's attention—beneath it is a thick line, and beside it in the margin are three parallel pencil marks—but was echoed two years later in one of his monologues. "Mind and soul ultimately return to the collective being of the world," Hitler told some guests in December of 1941. "If there is a God, then he gives us not only life but also consciousness and awareness. If I live my life according to my God-given insights, then I cannot go wrong, and even if I do, I know I have acted in good faith."

As I sat in the rarefied seclusion of the Jefferson Building's second-floor reading room one day, listening to the muffled roar of traffic and the distant wail of police sirens in late-summer Washington, I attempted to comprehend the full significance of this sentence to which Hitler seems to have responded so emphatically. Back in 1943 Walter Langer had concluded—correctly, to my mind—that in order to understand Hitler one had to understand his profound belief in divine powers. But Hitler believed that the mortal and the divine were one and the same: that the God he was seeking was in fact himself.

The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/05/ryback.htm.

Adventures in Wonderland
Jasper Fforde’s mysteries are delighting readers - thanks to feisty female superhero Thursday Next and a machine that transports humans into the pages of classic books
By Dan Cryer
STAFF WRITER

April 22, 2003

Call it the third-son syndrome. After the arrival of two brilliant and talented boys, pity the little guy who turns up next in the family cradle.

What's the poor kid to do? Struggle to duplicate his older brothers' achievements? Search out his own path? Give up the race altogether and drop out?

If you're Jasper Fforde, you run away and join the circus.

The third son of an Oxford don in economics who rose to executive directorship of the Bank of England, brother of a member of Parliament and two academics - including his younger sister - Jasper Fforde never bothered with a college education. He joined the circus that is the movie industry.

For 19 years, he labored by day as a lowly assistant cameraman - on films such as "GoldenEye" and "The Mask of Zorro" - by night as an amateur writer scribbling away with little hope of publication, let alone fame.

But today Jasper is the Fforde sibling basking in the spotlight. He's author of a best-selling novel, "The Eyre Affair," and now a sequel, "Lost in a Good Book" (Viking, $24.95), expected to be equally successful.

Part mystery, part science fiction, part satire, part lit-crowd entertainment, these hard-to-classify books cross genres with abandon. Consider what Fforde is juggling: Time-travel, newly discovered Shakespeare plays, a machine enabling people to enter classic works of fiction and interact with characters, Ice Age mammoths and 20th century Orwellian bureaucracy - all these elements coexist in the same fictional universe.

Think of Fforde's work as Harry Potter for adults, although the brightest of young readers probably will join in the fun, too.

What makes it all work is the author's storytelling verve and admirably light touch. Whatever else Fforde is up to, he's clearly having a ball.

At the heart of the stories stands Thursday Next, the feistiest and wittiest of sleuths. A droll combination of Nancy Drew, Bridget Jones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess, she's as likely to nail the bad guys with a bon mot as a bullet.

In the first novel, Thursday faced off against a wicked enemy - her university mentor, no less - and dove into "Jane Eyre" to invent a happier ending than Charlotte Bronte ever would have countenanced.

"Lost in a Good Book" teams up our heroine with Miss Havisham, the jilted-at-the-altar spinster of Dickens' "Great Expectations." Now that Thursday is married and pregnant, Goliath, the corporation that owns nearly everything, has spirited off her husband to parts unknown. Meanwhile, an unidentifiable sludge threatens to engulf all life on Earth.

Fforde's fiction scrambles time, helter-skelter, making for delicious comedy. In the Britain of 1985, for example, the Crimean War (1853-1856, according to historians) still grinds on, and Neanderthals have been resurrected from extinction.

"How you managed to become the dominant species we will never know. So full of hate, anger and vanity," observes a Neanderthal.

"It's our evolutionary edge," replies a smirking human.

Fforde is an unassuming 42-year-old who appears incapable of smirking. He lives in rural Wales with his companion, Mari Roberts. Making his U.S. book tour, he is as genial as one can be in the face of a seemingly endless round of interviews.

Weren't John and Marya Fforde upset, he is asked, when their third son told them he wasn't headed for college, let alone an elite university? After all, John was an Oxford graduate and Jasper's two older brothers were enrolled there as well.

Fforde laughs, replying that their presence at Oxford actually made it easier for him to skip out on the family tradition. "One of them was at Brasenose [one of the university's oldest and most prestigious colleges] by that time, so I'm sure that more than made up for my absence." (All of his siblings went on to earn doctorates.)

"I think maybe the expectation drops, perhaps, with the third son," he adds.

At any rate, there was no keeping 20-year-old Jasper from what he had always wanted to do. He broke into the movie business in 1983 as a gofer on "The Pirates of Penzance." Within a few years, he was promoted to "focus puller," the position he would hold for the rest of his career.

The U.S. counterpart, he explains, is called first assistant cameraman. The focus puller assembles the camera, makes sure the lenses are functioning properly and, most important, adjusts them during filming.

"It's a bit trickier than it sounds," Fforde says. Focus shifts from closeup to mid-range to panoramic involve "a lot of guesswork. You don't know whether you've got it right until the following day, when you watch the dailies."

Fforde's camera work on "Quills," "The Saint," "Entrapment" and other feature films, plus numerous shorts and commercials, took him to 23 countries. The travel was enriching, he says, the camaraderie among movie technicians delightful.

"But I don't miss standing in a muddy field at 3 in the morning when it's raining and a director's going, 'I think we'll do that shot one more time and we'll know we've got it.'"

All the while, Fforde's previously hidden writerly impulse began to express itself. It was first manifest in "jokes and funnies and pretend articles" he pinned on crew bulletin boards during the making of "Penzance."

By his late 20s, he was writing "tons of" short stories. But none of them were intended for publication.

Aside from a two-day workshop in story structure with the famed screenwriter Robert McKee, Fforde has "no training in literature at all." He argues, in fact, that further education can sometimes stifle creation of a writer's distinctive voice.

As Fforde's competence and confidence grew, one story grew so fat that it became a novel. Even in this maiden effort, a police procedural, his fantasy- based imagination fed off other writers' characters.

In this version, Humpty Dumpty doesn't merely fall off that wall; he's been shot. Jack Spratt is the investigating detective, with Captain Nemo of Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and Prometheus of Greek mythology playing subordinate roles.

Fforde is a dogged exemplar of the power of persistence. In between submitting that first book to publishers and acceptance of "The Eyre Affair" in 2000, he received 76 rejection letters. Bookselling being all about marketing, publishers couldn't picture a niche for such a genre-hopping book.

"I thought, well, they obviously don't know what they're missing," Fforde says. "I have a sort of arrogant, stubborn streak that keeps me going when people say no.

"I just carried on in my own sweet way. Which I think was a great help, because I realized I could just write whatever I wanted. There were no limits."

So he dashed off another Jack Spratt-centered mystery about Goldilocks and the Three Bears. And then he returned to a book about Jane Eyre that he had started and put aside, out of fear that his work was committing a kind of literary crime against a classic heroine.

Once emboldened, however, Fforde let out all the imaginative stops. His marvelous inventions for the Thursday Next books include the Prose Portal, a machine for transporting humans into fiction; the Boojum, the eradication of a word, character or subplot from a book; the Pagerunner, a character from one book causing havoc in another.

The author can't pinpoint what exactly inspired his Superwoman of a detective, though he does allow that he finds women in general more interesting than men.

In the end, "The Eyre Affair" was five years in the writing. The fifth novel he completed, it was the first available to the public.

Sadly, John Fforde died in May 2000, just three months before a British publisher accepted his son's book and transformed him forever from focus puller to novelist.

In a way, John and Marya Fforde deserve some of the credit. "My parents always had tons of books in the house," Fforde says. "I mean, just acres, every wall was covered." (By 1992, John Fforde's own 881-page tome on the Bank of England would take its place on the shelves.)

And one of those books, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," with the original John Tenniel drawings, "created this wonderful make-believe world where anything can happen, a talking sheep or flowers that argue. ... Its complete and utter nonsense was probably the spark that started it all."

Other influences Fforde cites include darkly comic novels such as "Catch-22" and "Slaughterhouse Five"; the pioneering science fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne; the classic mysteries of Agatha Christie. But he makes no pretense of being widely read in contemporary fiction.

Although acknowledging the impact of Harry Potter for enlarging the audience for escapist fantasy, he says he conceived the Thursday Next books without reading any of J.K. Rowling's work.

Like Potter, Ms. Next will have her life extended beyond the existing books. Fforde is contracted to write at least two more in the series. Again like Potter, she will continue to age, beyond her current 36 years.

When not keeping company with the intrepid Thursday Next, Fforde enjoys piloting a 1937 DeHavilland biplane over the Welsh countryside. It's a hobby his father would appreciate. During World War II, in the battle against the Japanese, John Fforde also was a pilot, flying Royal Air Force bombers into Burma.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.

April 17, 2003
Murder, They Wrote, and Wrote
By JANET MASLIN

We are in the midst of a reader's dream, a publicist's nightmare and a best-seller logjam.

In the realm of high-profile mystery writing, an amazing convergence happens to be under way. Virtually all of that genre's big guns — which is to say its most celebrated and popular male practitioners — have managed to bring out new crime novels in the same season. Only so-called retirement and a sudden interest in the Crusades, respectively, have kept two big exceptions, Stephen King and James Patterson (whose 11th-century latest is "The Jester"), out of this all-star swarm.

Why now? Call it a mystery. For those who write like clockwork (i.e., Stuart Woods, the Nora Roberts of mystery best-sellerdom), a new book every few months is no surprise. For others, seasonal publication is as dependable as migrating geese. (If it's February, it's John Grisham time.)

Then there are those like Dennis Lehane, whose last book was so good that his new one seems long-awaited, even if "Mystic River" established his stature only two years ago. Now suddenly there is Dan Brown's dazzling "Da Vinci Code," the erudition-laced wild card that arrived out of nowhere and went straight to the head of the class.

The mystery field is broad enough to accommodate writers from Mr. Brown, who can hinge a plot on the difference between matter and antimatter, to Robert Crais ("The Last Detective"), who cranks out the printed equivalent of formulaic Hollywood thrillers. It can feature stand-alone protagonists or serial detectives as familiar as old friends. "As I walked through the room, the men stared at me," observes Robert B. Parker's Spenser in "Back Story," the 30th book in Mr. Parker's unflaggingly congenial Boston-based series. "Probably sick with envy."

The violence quotient varies greatly. Mr. Patterson and Jeffery Deaver get much of their mileage by exploiting tastes for the grisly. "He straightened up, considering what he might do to the still form in front of him," Mr. Deaver writes at the start of his latest Lincoln Rhyme book, "The Vanished Man," describing a homicidal sadist and his first female victim. This is a far cry from Daniel Silva, whose best-selling "Confessor" features the elite art restorer Gabriel Allon as its protagonist. Like Mr. Brown, Mr. Silva deals in characters who know art, roam Europe and might just say something in Latin.

Others, like Harlan Coben ("No Second Chance") and Jonathan Kellerman ("A Cold Heart"), whose new books arrive later this month, are much more insightful, sensitive and mild. "Bear with me," remarks Mr. Kellerman's Dr. Alex Delaware, a psychologist, with his typical patience. "I need to get some context." Then there is Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch (back in "Lost Light"), who has never unearthed an injustice that didn't make him moody.

Mr. Connelly, like George P. Pelecanos ("Soul Circus"), has been pivotal in reinventing the traditional gumshoe story for streetwise settings and more socially conscious times, without losing that genre's entertainment value. Mr. Pelecanos's Washington-based Derek Strange, in particular, has become a charismatic figure in this landscape, a sharp, affectionately drawn private investigator. Strange, whose shingle reads "Strange Investigations," digs thoughtfully into each case. Mr. Pelecanos, whose work gets better and better, continues to ascribe motives more wrenching than random ugliness to perpetrators whose lives have gone wrong.

But the single best example of this neo-noir crime writing has been "Mystic River," Mr. Lehane's deep, sorrowful story of a murder near Boston. While devising a classic crime story, Mr. Lehane escaped the limitations of the form to write a serious, ultimately devastating novel. It was clear from "Mystic River" that this writer, who began with more traditional detective fiction, had emerged from the whodunit ghetto as a broader and more substantial talent. Now he returns to the mystery format with the mind-bending twists of an eerie, startlingly original story.

"Shutter Island" unfolds in 1954. Its setting — a forbidding hospital for the criminally insane in Boston Harbor — is not automatically alluring unless you appreciate the classic constraints of an Agatha Christie puzzle; in that case it's irresistible. Shutter Island can be reached only by ferry. The doors of the institution are either locked or watched. The book's main character, United States Marshal Teddy Daniels, has been sent to investigate the disappearance of a patient, a barefoot woman who vanished from a locked cell and left behind an encrypted message no one understands.

Writing with a crisp clarity that makes the layout of Shutter Island instantly cinematic, Mr. Lehane unfolds this story unfold straightforwardly at first. Then the tricks begin. The missing patient, Rachel Solando, seems to have been involved with a doctor who also disappeared. The doctors at the hospital seem a strange bunch. ("Men of violence fascinate me," one says insinuatingly to Teddy. The possibility of illicit drug experiments on human guinea pigs, also recently raised by Mr. Grisham in "The King of Torts," begins to loom. In this atmosphere, with a cast of certifiably deranged characters, it grows harder and harder to know what is true.

Teddy is increasingly haunted by the allure of his wife, Dolores, who has died but speaks to him in his thoughts as the investigation proceeds. When Teddy learns that the man he blames for Dolores's death may be a Shutter Island inmate, he hears Dolores telling him, "You've known."

The primary force of this book comes from Teddy's grief and his anguished memories of World War II, when he helped liberate inmates at Dachau. (Mr. Lehane can be elegantly succinct: "Charm had never come easily to Teddy. After the war, it had come harder still. After Dolores, not at all.")

But its hidden power has a different source: Mr. Lehane's insight into his book's most disturbed figures. Suffice it to say that this is a deft, suspenseful thriller that unfolds with increasing urgency until it delivers a visceral shock in its final moments. When it comes to keeping readers exactly where he wants them, Mr. Lehane offers a bravura demonstration of how it's done.

By comparison, Mr. Connelly's "Lost Light" and Mr. Woods's "Dirty Work" are enjoyable, but much more conventional. Each is part of a series, and each marks the return of the author's signature character. In the case of Mr. Woods (whose book is dedicated to Charlton and Lydia Heston), it is Stone Barrington, lounge lizard extraordinaire. Mr. Woods has become so invested in incorporating Elaine's, the Manhattan restaurant, into his fiction that he gives Elaine herself dialogue and informs us that she has stopped smoking.

Once he stops playing barfly and gets down to detecting, Stone is as disarming as ever, even if the plotting of "Dirty Work" is relatively subdued. Stone once cut a hedonistic swath through London, Hollywood and Palm Beach; this time he doesn't get far from Elaine's. This book involves an international hit woman and is set mostly in New York. Stone remains affable if not incendiary company. And he is the kind of detective who has a favorite brand of Champagne.

Mr. Connelly's Harry Bosch, who threatened to chuck his career in disgust four years ago and left the Los Angeles Police Department, is back to silence cries of "say it ain't so" from loyal readers. Now, in "Lost Light," the world-weary Harry is a former cop doing freelance work. He is summoned by a movie producer who prompts him to reopen an old investigation.

"The cases keep coming, Mr. Taylor," Harry tells him. "It's not like in your movies. I wish it was." (Harry's detecting skills are better than his grammar.)

While in career limbo, Harry sounded the quintessential blue note that endears him to noir-loving readers: "I was living like a jazz musician waiting for a gig. I was staying up late, staring at the walls and drinking too much red wine. I needed to either pawn my instrument or find a place to play it." But once Harry picks up his saxophone, figuratively speaking, he gets returns to well-worn, familiar Connelly territory. Thinking of the murder that draws him back, Harry experiences "a small tug toward the darkness I one time knew so well."

"Lost Light" is B-level Bosch, but it has been an instant hit. Almost all the books mentioned here have turned up on at least one best-seller list, just as Mr. Coben's and Mr. Kellerman's latest are apt to do. In cases like Mr. Parker's, this is merely the writerly equivalent of having a hit television series (which he already has, via Spenser). For Mr. Brown, the more relevant model may just be "Titanic." And for Mr. Lehane "Shutter Island" is liable to have the staying power of "The Sixth Sense."

No matter how huge the deluge of mysteries, they have a tireless, eager readership. Escapism is not going out of style.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

Publishers Weekly

Boston's Uncommon Bestseller
By Edward Nawotka -- 4/14/2003

Dennis Lehane takes life, success and the mystery genre in hand

When Dennis Lehane smiles, small wrinkles form at the corners of his mouth; his freckles rearrange. It's a dramatic difference from the scowling young man with a single loose forelock staring out from the photos on his early books: he is much better looking in person, and not necessarily the guy you would pick out of a lineup to write some of the most menacing and absorbing detective fiction in the last decade. A lot of mystery writers have based series in Boston, two of the biggest being Robert Parker and George V. Higgins—but, arguably, neither has captured the same degree of social and psychological nuance Lehane has in his seven novels so far. Now creeping up on 40 years, Lehane is starting to show a little silver around the edges of his short auburn hair. The overall impression is one of confidence and youth. Maybe it's the way he's dressed, like a college kid fresh from finishing school: in khakis, with a black blazer over a charcoal-gray merino crewneck. He may have grown up on the mean streets of Boston, but he's left them behind this afternoon.

We meet on Newbury Street in the heart of fashionable, moneyed Boston. Lehane has parked his navy blue Toyota SUV in the same parking garage where he first worked as an attendant after returning from college and graduate school in Florida. It's across the street from the original Ritz Carlton Hotel, where Lehane still knows people who have worked there since the days when the hotel owned the parking garage. As PW approaches him in the lobby of the Ritz, he's chatting to one of the hotel staff, describing a summer home he's rented and suggesting she and her husband come up for a visit.

There are few jobs in Boston for a kid with a master's degree in creative writing—"The guys in the garage would give me a hard time about it"—and back in the early '90s Lehane had published only the first of his seven crime novels, the best known and bestselling of which is 2001's Mystic River. That extraordinary novel described the Boston of Lehane's childhood, a place "cramped with corner stores, small playgrounds, and butcher shops where meat, still pink with blood, hung in the windows" and where "Days, the mothers searched the papers for coupons. Nights, the fathers went to bars. You knew everyone; nobody ever left." The new Boston, as exemplified by the wealth of Newbury Street, is populated with the young, beautiful and well-to-do who have made their fortune in the city's tech boom (now waning) and driven property prices to among the highest in the country. "Now that's something we can be proud of," Lehane quips. "We're now more expensive than San Francisco."

Change for the Better
Boston's surface streets may have changed but in its heart, it's still an old seaport. The city is so close to the ocean that on warm spring days the scent of saltwater wafts in from offshore. But that same breeze can quickly turn into a Nor'easter. One only has to think back to Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm to be reminded of the sorrow bad weather can bring.

Perhaps it was from Junger that Lehane took a cue for the milieu of his seventh book, Shutter Island, due for a 150,000-copy, one-day laydown on April 15. At the center of the novel is a dramatic storm that hits the eponymous island in outer Boston Harbor—home to a federal prison for the criminally insane—just after U.S. Marshall Edward "Teddy" Daniels arrives to help search for a murderess who has mysteriously escaped from her locked cell. The year is 1954—this is Lehane's first historical fiction—and the stage is set for Daniels to become an unwilling participant in a government plot to manipulate innocents, murderers and WWII vets in McCarthy-era America. Suitably, Wolfgang Petersen, the director who adopted Junger's The Perfect Storm into a movie, has bought the film option to Shutter Island.

If the story sounds melodramatic, well, Lehane admits that he is heavily influenced by the movies, going so far as to call himself a "fanatic" and citing the 1970s cult movie The Wicker Man as a strong influence on the book. One might also catch echoes of the Frank Sinatra vehicle The Manchurian Candidate or The Ipcress File, which was based on Len Deighton's first novel, or even the Michael Douglas film The Game, from the late '90s.

When PW meets Lehane, one of the first things he says after sitting down to lunch at a modest Italian restaurant is, "I expect Shutter Island to get bad reviews." Lehane provides a flurry of reasons for that curious statement. "It's the first book I ever outlined in my life. I knew everything that was going to happen before it wrote it. A full third of the people who read it will figure it out before the end. The book is not Mystic River, it's something very different, and it's always a danger to change when you have success."

Lehane needn't fear change. Early reviews of Shutter Island have been enthusiastic, including a starred review from PW. Prior to his breakthrough with Mystic River, he made a respectable living as the author of an award-winning series of five crime novels, all set in Boston and starring a pair of gritty private eyes, Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. (The first, A Drink Before the War, was published in 1994 and won the Shamus Award for best first P.I. novel.) It was the standalone Mystic River, however, that proved Lehane's breakthrough book, spending more than nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and selling 100,000 copies in hardcover. The novel was recently filmed by Clint Eastwood, starring an A-list roster of stars, including Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon as three neighborhood friends—all haunted by an incident in childhood when one of the boys was abducted—who are thrown together when the daughter of one of them is murdered. The movie is scheduled for release this autumn.

No Mystery
Lehane's publisher, Michael Morrison at Morrow, calls Mystic River "a huge leap." He attributes some of the book's success to a new strategy at Morrow that identified Lehane's sales potential and did the right things to exploit it. "It's a result of cause and effect," says Morrison. "It's no mystery." One of the most important decisions was to alter Lehane's covers, which until then had been very dark, often using gemstone-colored type on a black background. Mystic River was given a plainer cover, with black type on a white background, that announced "novel" instead of "noir."

"It was a more inviting look," says Claire Wachtel, Lehane's editor at Morrow. The approach was so radically different that bookstores started displaying the novel front-and-center, while price clubs such as Costco and Sam's picked up Lehane for the first time.

"He'd always had good numbers and devoted fans," continues Wachtel, "but we wanted to keep growing his readership." She says that the change booksellers were responding to wasn't just due to marketing, but involved the type of book Lehane was writing: Mystic River was a much more emotionally and psychologically complex tale than the Kenzie/Gennaro crime stories. Lehane had hit his stride and everybody knew it. Commenting on Lehane's decision to abandon the Kensie/Gennaro crime series, Lehane's agent, Ann Rittenberg, says, "He's always had a distinctive writing style and, and when he told me that he was going to 'alter the face of crime fiction,' I knew he would. He's like a top athlete who because he's in shape can change his game."

Wachtel says she knew she was onto a winner with Mystic River just as soon as "other agents and editors started calling me to have galleys sent over." The early buzz on the book built to a crescendo once Mystic River was chosen as a Book Sense 76 #1 pick. "The stars just lined up," she adds.

"I was living with Mystic River for 10 years before I wrote it," Lehane tells PW. "I had said everything I had to say about the two detectives and wanted to move on to something different. Ann [Rittenberg] and Claire [Wachtel] both encouraged me to do it."

Though he describes himself as a "control freak," Lehane's ability to stick to the job of writing, while allowing others to lobby on his behalf, has probably been one of his biggest assets. Rittenberg says that because Lehane wasn't greedy early on, he was able to "build" a career rather than have himself jettisoned into the marketplace with a big printing—and the accompanying bigger critical and financial risks. "His sales and his advances moved up like steps," says Rittenberg, who sold A Drink Before the War to Wachtel for a mere $8,500 in 1993. It took until Prayers for Rain, his fifth book, before she was able to "break the $100,000 barrier" for advances, she says. "Dennis told me that he'd always been poor and could live that way a little while longer. I always thought he was worth more." Prior to delivering Mystic River, Lehane's contract was for three more books and was priced far less than his current level. The quality of the manuscript prompted Rittenberg to call Morrison for a lunch to talk about Lehane's commitments to the company. "When I told him how much I wanted, he almost couldn't finish what he was eating," Rittenberg jokes. Lehane's renegotiated contract with Morrow, which covers both Mystic River and Shutter Island, as well as three more novels, amounts to more than $3 million, with a bonus promised if the books meet sales goals.

Cause and Effect
There's an old saying that goes, "Money doesn't change you, it just gives you the opportunity be the person you really are." So what is Dennis Lehane like after all this heady critical and financial success? Apparently, he's not much different than he was before finding his name on the New York Times bestseller list. He still lives in Boston with his pair of bulldogs, Marlon and Stella. He still writes at least three drafts of each novel, the first by hand, the second on the computer. He still listens to music when he writes—rock for action sequences, classical for the more contemplative scenes. (For Shutter Island, he listened to Sinatra singing Rodgers and Hart). He still has the same group of friends he's had since childhood, guys who are blessed with having their names immortalized as drug dealers, murderers or other criminals in Lehane's novels. According to him, the one concession he's made to hitting the A-list is buying a new pool table (an eight-foot competition model) and a wide-screen plasma television.

After spending an afternoon eating and drinking with Lehane, it's evident to PW that the author remains as down to earth and as dedicated to writing as the master's degree–wielding parking garage attendant he once was.

His modesty as an adult may be a result of his modest upbringing. Born and raised in Dorchester, one of the poorest Boston neighborhoods, Lehane was the youngest of five children of a pair of Catholic working-class Irish immigrants from Cork. His first book was the Bible. "I read it cover to cover. It was cool," he says without irony. "If you singled out the times in Mystic River with religious symbolism, I mean you're practically in a Scorsese film."

As a teen, Lehane's dream was to become a writer. During his childhood, Lehane's Boston was not the cozy, overpriced college tech-town it is now. Instead, it was a racially divided, parochial city suffering from poverty and drugs. During the era of forced busing (memorialized in Anthony Lukas's book Common Ground), violence ran rampant. One of Lehane's friends was murdered during this time, and the first thing the future writer did when he got the chance was to get out: after dropping out of UMass Boston, he moved to Florida, finishing his B.A. at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg and then taking an M.F.A. from Florida International University, where he studied with novelist John Dufresne and mystery writer John Sandiford.

In college, Lehane learned how to write. "John Dufresne is one of the great writing teachers," he says. "Dufresne calls fiction 'the lie that tells the truth.' " Although Lehane doesn't say so, it's clear that, after an extended writing apprenticeship with the Kensie/Gennaro series, it was in Mystic River that he at last fully embraced Dufresne's dictum to tell the truth—including the traumatic truth of the emotional aftermath of his own difficult youth—through fiction.

Lehane has been so inspired by his experience in writing classes that he's begun teaching them himself, first at Tufts University and later this summer at the Harvard Extension School. "I had some really good teachers and I try to give back, you know, send the elevator car back down. It's great to see someone who has got the chops—maybe they're six years, nine years away from publication—and be able to tell them 'stay on the road, you're going to make it.' " He adds that if anyone comes to one of his classes looking for a how-to on how to write a bestseller, he tries to "scare them right out the door."

Lehane doesn't have much time for the high/low debate that has created two opposing literary camps over the last 40 years. "You can't separate character—which is what the higher set champions—and plot—which is what the other side defends. They are both in service to each other," he says with a hint of exasperation. "If you go to any great work of art, you talk about plot all day and then you talk about character all day. Just give me a well-written book."

Both Mystic River and Shutter Island deliver on this demand. For his next, Lehane is promising a trilogy that begins in 1918 with the Boston police strike and traces the reverberations it had in American society. "The strike changed everything," he says. "It had a big effect on the unionization movement, and Prohibition came on the heels of that, then Calvin Coolidge promising to break the unions. That's all linked to what's going on now." Lehane describes it as a five- or six-year project. "It'll be an epic about small-scale violence," he says with finality.

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