Whether it was his prodigious publication rate or the untiring help he extended to his students, the remarkable generosity he showed to colleagues or the anger he occasionally displayed over what he considered to be problematic scholarship, or merely his outsized appetite for good food, Gerry Feldman was a titanic force in the field of German history for more than forty years. His fascination with the past, love of the present, and concern for the future transformed his spacious home in the Oakland hills and his cramped office at the University of California at Berkeley into international destinations for itinerant intellectuals. His writing and his personal relations were infused with an exuberant delight in the most mundane of things and a wry appreciation of life's greatest challenges. With his passing, we have lost a great advocate of transnational scholarly relations, one of the profession's most talented economic historians, and our foremost expert on the Weimar Republic, its antecedents, and the men who dug its grave.
Why Geology Matters: decoding the past, anticipating the future by Doug MacDougall. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2011. No. of pages: xiv + 285. Price: US$24.95. ISBN 978-0-520-27271-2 (paperback).