Main Kampf Parts 1 & 2The unexpurgated edition translated by James Murphy in 1939In 1925 a thirty-five year-old Adolf Hitler, veteran of World War One, was the leader of an emerging political party who had staged a failed coup and, as a result, found himself locked up in a German prison. By July of that year he had dictated the text of his first book to Comrade Rudolph Hess in their shared cell. The two men later completed what would become Hitler's manifesto at a Bavarian Tavern. Mein Kampf fast became a German bestseller and clearly reflected the mood of the people at the time, namely a dissatisfaction with their government's immigration policy. Mein Kampf reflects Hitler's personal ideology as a young man and outlined his ideas for the German Reich. Chillingly, it also demonstrates how a largely peaceful nation of people can move very quickly to the right wing when challenged and the book soon became one of the most popular texts in the whole of Germany. The question is, is history going to repeat itself...?

In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least 5 million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than 3 million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them.
Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic’s borders and seized all available food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil.