AUTOCRAT ASCENDING

N , documentarian-turned-author Cory Taylor follows in the footsteps of Ian Kershaw, the eminent British scholar and author of a well-known two-volume Hitler biography. Like Kershaw, Taylor examines the societal forces that helped to fashion the former homeless man from Vienna and lance corporal in the Bavarian Army during World War I. But the author focuses in even greater detail on Hitler’s pivotal early years in Munich, where he became a rabid anti-Semite and Nationalist agitator. Taylor shows that a sophisticated network of ethnic chauvinists within Germany’s aristocracy and army essentially helped groom Hitler to take power in the belief that he would