Book reviews: The Third Reich’s Celluloid Story | Travels in Tandem | The Dodger

MICHAEL Kerrigan casts his eye over the pick of this week’s book releases

The Third Reich’s Celluloid Story

By Ian Garden

(History Press, £20)

Rating: ****

“Fascism aestheticises politics,” said Walter Benjamin – and nowhere more obviously, perhaps, than in the medium of film. Hence our tendency to respond strongly to an overall “look” and “style” in Nazi cinema. Hence too a certain awed reverence: when we’re not putting it down in disgust as a spew of antisemitism, we’re building it up with horrified awe as a supremely effective mechanism for swaying minds. That at times it touched both those extremes is all too clear from this fascinating (and generously illustrated) survey.

Garden gets right into the detail, considering scores of individual films – from costume dramas to documentaries; patriotic epics to romances and comedies. He analyses the ways in which they were made and the ways in which they work (or don’t). He finds ineptness as well as brilliance; self-criticism as well as fanatic triumphalism – sometimes even a degree of self-deprecation.

Travels in Tandem

By Susanna Hoe

(Holo, £19.99)

Rating: ****

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In this absorbing and original study, Susanna Hoe takes us on a journey through travel literature, exploring key texts written by his’n’hers travel partnerships. Making our way through Siberia with Thomas and Lucy Atkinson, we tour the East Indies with Scotland’s Henry O and Anna Forbes; mosey through Mongolia with Owen and Eleanor Lattimore and trek into Xinjiang with Ella Maillart and Peter Fleming (who travelled just as friends); and through Liberia with Barbara and Graham Greene. A real voyage of discovery.

The Dodger

By Tim Carroll

(Mainstream, £18.99)

Rating: ****

Great War, Great Game, Great Escape … John Bigelow Dodge lived in heroic times – and did his bit to make them more heroic still. They were tragic times as well, of course: as the decades – and the wars – went by “Johnny” saw beloved comrades killed in their scores and hundreds. But he never questioned their sacrifices, or his own. A friend of Rupert Brooke; a cousin and a protégé of Winston Churchill, American-born Johnny joined the Army’s Royal Naval Division in 1914 and never looked back. In writing this first full biography, Carroll has drawn on half a century’s research – but he’s also had the perspective that the passage of time can bring. So he’s more sceptical than an earlier chronicler might have been; more clear about the sense of Anglo-Saxon entitlement underlying the Boy’s Own worldview. Yet those reservations only throw into greater relief the astounding audacity and resourcefulness of Johnny and the other “Great Escapers” in the Second World War – a great generation by just about any measure.