The first volume of the personal memoirs of William Shirer, as opposed to the memoirs he wrote regarding his eyewitness accounts of covering the Second World War for CBS News. It takes a reader through his childhood in Chicago and Cedar Rapids, his college years, and then the years he spent in Europe for the Chicago Tribune, up through the start of the Great Depression (and about 7-8 years before he fatefully joined CBS). Some things about the book rankle; he has a disdain for Calvin Coolidge that rankles (one wonders if Shirer knew that Coolidge, far from being "dimwit," probably had an academic record at Amherst much better than Franklin Roosevelt's at Harvard). And while one grants that he met a lot of interesting people, the sheer plethora of name-dropping that goes on in the book rankles. About the only thing in that line that doesn't rankle is his experiences with co-worker James Thurber. The portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, is unpleasant, and something about his description of Isadora Duncan (the dancer) doesn't quite come off. Interesting in many respects, but I'm not sure I'd want to have dinner with Shirer. ( )

Shirer was one of the great journalists of the 20th Century, but perhaps best known as the author of ´The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich´. In this, the first of three volumes, he describes his childhood in rural Iowa, and the beginning of his professional career in Paris, London and Vienna. He describes meeting and interviewing thousands (yes, not just hundreds) of writers, politicians, artists, authors, academics, journalists and minor royalty. Somewhere in there he manages to fit in dramatic descriptions of the landing of Lindbergh in Paris and the Great Crash of 1929 (including a scathing attack on academic economists).

It is one thing to say what it is about, but another to put a value on what is being said. If you are interested in journalism this is essential reading. For the rest; it is a lively backdrop to any study of early 20th century arts or politics, and it is a bit of a window back in time to life in a small Iowa town in the early 1900s. Which is to say that it is a good, indeed great, book to come to if you already have an interest in those times (people and places). But it is not the sort of book that would likely engage (or maintain) an interest if you had not prepared for it in advance. Shirer doesn´t spend much time on introductions, and the effect of so many famous names arriving on each page is a little numbing.

There are beautiful little insights into the lives of the famous, such as Benes, Dewey and Caillaux which you might not get anywhere else, but you might also be forgiven for not knowing who they were, or for not being interested even if you did. In some ways Shirer´s book was an early version of Wikipedia, which I might add has been a boon companion in following up the hundreds of trails and links he hints at in his text. Reading this has been a bit like standing in a small country railway station - say Krastec - and watching the Orient Express thunder through in the middle of the night. The glittering brilliance is a little removed from your everyday experience. Shirer might say ´Get on board´, and that is certainly the message for journalism students. For the rest of us, it might be easier to get on board his autobiography at volume 2, with Europe and the World heading for the greatest train wreck of the 20th Century, and work your way back from there to this first installment. ( )

Shirer, William L. (William Lawrence), 1904-1993.