In February 1987, Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev personally received Yoko Ono in Moscow. In a surprising revelation, Raisa declared that she and her husband were fans of John Lennon. While Raisa sang lyrics from a Lennon song, the Soviet leader observed solemnly, "John should have been here." It was a stunning declaration. After three decades of virulent anti-rock rhetoric, a Soviet leader had allied himself with the forces of rock &amp; roll. In the era of glasnost and perestroika, rock &amp; roll has provided, in a very real sense, the soundtrack to the Gorbachev revolution. This stunning policy shift has fueled the already burgeoning Soviet rock scene and has commanded intense media attention in the West. But as Timothy W. Ryback demonstrates in this lively and revealing book, Western music, particularly rock &amp; roll, is not new to the Soviet bloc. Indeed, as Mr. Ryback shows, rock music has effected one of the most significant transformations ever in Soviet bloc society. He traces the emergence of rock culture in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union from 1954 to the present day, where it has become unquestionably the most pervasive form of mass cultural activity in Communist society. Charting this process, Rock Around the Bloc looks at both sides of the thirty-year war between rock fans and Soviet bloc governments. It takes the reader into the Kremlin for special Central Committee meetings devoted to the "evil" of rock music; into the streets of beleaguered 1968 Prague and 1981 Poland where rock bands and their fans helped spearhead social and political reforms; and into the bedrooms of young people secretly tuning into rock broadcasts from the BBC and Radio Free Europe. The reader comes to realize that in some ways, life in the Soviet bloc was surprisingly similar to life in the West. There was the Elvis craze in the late 1950s, Beatlemania in 1964, and the disturbing appearance of punks and skinheads on urban streets in the early 1980s. At the same time, these similarities make the differences all the more striking. Prague's mid-1960s drug cult relied on analgesics mixed with alcohol to ape western drugs. In 1969 young Moscow musicians seeking to convert their acoustic guitars into electric ones dismantled every public phone in Moscow to pilfer the electronic parts. And Dean Reed, an expatriate American who became a genuine Soviet bloc superstar selling millions of records, died mysteriously shortly after expressing his desire to return to the United States. Informed throughout by a deep knowledge and love for the music as well as an understanding of the Soviet bloc's political and social realities, Rock Around the Bloc tells a fascinating story on many levels: the liberalization of communist society, the traumas and triumphs of Soviet bloc youth culture, the spread of rock's influence in unlikely places, and the surprisingly rich variety of rock &amp; roll in Eastern Europe that keeps its kinship to western music while forging a unique identity all its own. Engagingly written and full of compelling detail, Ryback's definitive account will delight all rock fans and will fascinate people interested in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and modern social history.

Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1954-1988

Arts & Photography

RybacK, Timothy W.

Music

Oxford University Press

Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life

A Washington Post Notable Book With a new chapter on eugenicist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race In this brilliant and original exploration of some of the formative influences in Adolf Hitler’s life, Timothy Ryback examines the books that shaped the man and his thinking. Hitler was better known for burning books than collecting them but, as Ryback vividly shows us, books were Hitler’s constant companions throughout his life. They accompanied him from his years as a frontline corporal during the First World War to his final days before his suicide in Berlin. With remarkable attention to detail, Ryback examines the surviving volumes from Hitler’s private book collection, revealing the ideas and obsessions that occupied Hitler in his most private hours and the consequences they had for our world. A feat of scholarly detective work, and a captivating biographical portrait, Hitler’s Private Library is one of the most intimate and chilling works on Hitler yet written.

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

The remarkable story of Josef Hartinger, the German prosecutor who risked everything to bring to justice the first killers of the Holocaust and whose efforts would play a key role in the Nuremberg tribunal. Before Germany was engulfed by Nazi dictatorship, it was a constitutional republic. And just before Dachau Concentration Camp became a site of Nazi genocide, it was a state detention center for political prisoners, subject to police authority and due process. The camp began its irrevocable transformation from one to the other following the execution of four Jewish detainees in the spring of 1933. Timothy W. Ryback’s gripping and poignant historical narrative focuses on those first victims of the Holocaust and the investigation that followed, as Hartinger sought to expose these earliest cases of state-condoned atrocity. In documenting the circumstances surrounding these first murders and Hartinger’s unrelenting pursuit of the SS perpetrators, Ryback indelibly evokes a society on the brink—one in which civil liberties are sacrificed to national security, in which citizens increasingly turn a blind eye to injustice, in which the bedrock of judicial accountability chillingly dissolves into the martial caprice of the Third Reich. We see Hartinger, holding on to his unassailable sense of justice, doggedly resisting the rising dominance of Nazism. His efforts were only a temporary roadblock to the Nazis, but Ryback makes clear that Hartinger struck a lasting blow for justice. The forensic evidence and testimony gathered by Hartinger provided crucial evidence in the postwar trials. Hitler’s First Victims exposes the chaos and fragility of the Nazis’ early grip on power and dramatically suggests how different history could have been had other Germans followed Hartinger’s example of personal courage in that time of collective human failure.

Hitler's First Victims: The Quest for Justice

History

Europe

KNOPF

From the internationally acclaimed author of Hitler's Private Library, a dramatic recounting of the six critical months before Adolf Hitler seized power, when the Nazi leader teetered between triumph and ruin In the summer of 1932, the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse. One in three Germans was unemployed. Violence was rampant. Hitler's National Socialists surged at the polls. Paul von Hindenburg, an aging war hero and avowed monarchist, was a reluctant president bound by oath to uphold the constitution. The November elections offered Hitler the prospect of a Reichstag majority and the path to political power. But instead, the Nazis lost two million votes. As membership hemorrhaged and financial backers withdrew, the Nazi Party threatened to fracture. Hitler talked of suicide. The New York Times declared he was finished. Yet somehow, in a few brief weeks, he was chancellor of Germany.&nbsp; In facinating detail and with previously un-accessed archival materials, Timothy W. Ryback tells the remarkable story of Hitler's dismantling of democracy through democratic process. He provides fresh perspective and insights into Hitler's personal and professional lives in these months, in all their complexity and uncertainty--backroom deals, unlikely alliances, stunning betrayals, an ill-timed tax audit, and a fateful weekend that changed our world forever. Above all, Ryback details why a wearied Hindenburg, who disdained the "Bohemian corporal," ultimately decided to appoint Hitler chancellor in January 1933. Within weeks, Germany was no longer a democracy.

Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power

Depicting contemporary Dachau, home of the first Nazi concentration camp, the first gas chamber, and the first crematory oven, proves an illusive task. Timothy Ryback travels to Dachau, looking for the community that inhabits the town today, to find out how the older people live with the memories and how the younger generation deals with the legacy; there he finds Martin Zaidenstadt. While Dachau's residents express vastly divergent ways of and reasons for living in a city coinhabited by ghosts, Ryback finds one daily constant: Martin Zaidenstadt's vigil in front of the camp's brick crematorium. Should you visit the crematorium, Martin will tell you, "My name is Martin Zaidenstadt. I survive this camp. I come here every day for fifty-three years." Martin claims to be a Holocaust survivor; he is both gadfly and guide, a man who embodies the paradox that is Dachau -- a place that was so successful at producing death, that it has become impossible for anyone who resides there to live a normal life. Ryback's inquiry into a place uncovers a person whose keen intelligence, subtle wit, and boundless goodwill help us to understand Dachau as a city unable to forget, yet unwilling to be defined by its abominable past. This is a stunning and passionate portrait.

The Last Survivor: In Search of Martin Zaidenstadt

World

Pantheon

In The Last Survivor, journalist Timothy Ryback explores the surprising--and often disturbing--ways the citizens of Dachau go about their lives in a city the rest of us associate with gas chambers and mass graves. A grandmother recalls the echo of wooden shoes on cobblestone, the clip-clop of inmates marched from boxcars to barracks under the cover of night. A mother-to-be opts to deliver in a neighboring town, so that her child's birth certificate will not be stamped DACHAU. An "SS baby," now middle-aged, wonders about the father he never knew. And should you visit Dachau, you will meet Martin Zaidenstadt, an 87 year-old who accosts tourists with a first-hand account of the camp before its liberation in 1945. Beautifully written, compassionate, wise, The Last Survivor takes us to a place that bears the mark of Cain--and a people unwilling to be defined by the past, yet painfully unable to forget.

The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau

Vintage

The remarkable story of Josef Hartinger, the German prosecutor who risked everything to bring to justice the first killers of the Holocaust and whose efforts would play a key role in the Nuremberg tribunal. At 9 am on April 13, 1933, deputy prosecutor Josef Hartinger received a telephone call summoning him to the newly established concentration camp of Dachau. Four prisoners had been shot. The SS guards claimed that the men had been trying to escape. But what Hartinger found when he arrived convinced him that something was terribly wrong. All four victims were Jews. Before Germany was engulfed by Nazi dictatorship, it was a constitutional republic. And just before Dachau became a site of Nazi genocide, it was a legal state detention center for political prisoners. In 1933, that began to change. In Hitler’s First Victims, Timothy W. Ryback evokes a society on the brink—one in which civil liberties are sacrificed to national security, in which citizens increasingly turn a blind eye to injustice, in which the bedrock of judicial accountability chillingly dissolves into the martial caprice of the Third Reich. This is an astonishing portrait of Hitler’s first moments in power, and the true story of one man’s race to expose the Nazis as murderers on the eve of the Holocaust.

The Last Survivor : in Search of Martin Zaidenstadt / Timothy W. Ryback

Pantheon Books

A brilliantly original exploration of some of the formative influences in Hitler’s life—the books he most revered, and how they shaped the man and his thinking. Hitler’s education and worldview were formed largely from the books in his private library. Recently, hundreds of those books were discovered in the Library of Congress by Timothy Ryback, complete with Hitler’s marginalia on their pages—underlines, question marks, exclamation points, scrawled comments. Ryback traces the path of the key phrases and ideas that Hitler incorporated into his writing, speeches, conversations, self-definition, and actions. We watch him embrace Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the works of Shakespeare. We see how an obscure treatise inspired his political career and a particular interpretation of Ibsen’s epic poem Peer Gynt helped mold his ruthless ambition. He admires Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic tract, The International Jew, and declares it required reading for fellow party members. We learn how hisextensive readings on religion and the occult provide the blueprint for his notion of divine providence, how the words of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are reborn as infamous Nazi catchphrases, and, finally, how a biography of Frederick the Great fired the destructive fanaticism that compelled Hitler to continue fighting World War II when all hope of victory was lost. Hitler’s Private Library, a landmark in the study of the Third Reich, offers a remarkable view into Hitler’s intellectual world and personal evolution. It demonstrates the ability of books to preserve in vivid ways the lives of their collectors, underscoring the importance of the tactile in the era of the digital.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Before Germany was engulfed by Nazi dictatorship, it was a constitutional republic. And just before Dachau Concentration Camp became a site of Nazi genocide, it was a state detention center for political prisoners, subject to police authority and due process. The camp began its irrevocable transformation from one to the other following the execution of four Jewish detainees in the spring of 1933. Timothy W. Ryback's gripping and poignant historical narrative focuses on those first victims of the Holocaust and the investigation that followed, as Josef Hartinger sought to expose these earliest cases of state-condoned atrocity. Although his efforts were only a temporary roadblock to the Nazis, Ryback makes clear that Hartinger struck a lasting blow for justice. The forensic evidence and testimony gathered by Hartinger provided crucial evidence in the postwar trials.    Hitler's First Victims exposes the chaos and fragility of the Nazis' early grip on power and dramatically suggests how different history could have been had other Germans followed Hartinger's example of personal courage in that time of collective human failure.

Americas

Tantor Audio

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by RybacK, Timothy W.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by RybacK, Timothy W.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by RybacK, Timothy W.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1954-1988

Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life

Hitler's First Victims: The Quest for Justice

Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power

The Last Survivor: In Search of Martin Zaidenstadt

The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau

Hitler's First Victims: The Quest for Justice

The Last Survivor : in Search of Martin Zaidenstadt / Timothy W. Ryback

Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life

Hitler's First Victims: The Quest for Justice