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From: book reviews Category: Books Date: 24 April 2008 Time: 09:14 PM Review: I had fallen asleep too often reading her book on totalitarianism therefore avoided this book which launched the famous phrase. It is brilliant. Full of scathing angry intelligence. One of most illuminating books on the holocaust, it shakes the heavy layers of rhetoric and cliche off the event, and confronts you again with the fresh huge depressing questions that it asks. Precise thoughts on justice and guilt. To take one small example she says of post-war young germans feeling guilt that is an easy sentimental emotion (aren't I virtuous for feeling guilty when I havent done anything) , and more appropriate would have been anger with their elders who had accepted former Nazis back into government and had failed (in the twenty years after the war) to acknowledge their generation's knowledge and complicity in the holocaust. She puts it better! Anyway read the book.