The widespread acclaim which has greeted this book seems to me somewhat overdone and even uncritical, since it is as much a personal thesis as a historical study. Its factual account of the Holocaust and its workings are valuable in themselves, even if the material is rarely new, and it still needs stressing that anti-Semitism was based on racial fears and prejudices which probably the majority of Europeans fully subscribed to, even if that did not make them mass murderers. However, much of the generalising and philosophising seems tendentious, at times even turgid and obvious, and it is not backed by any detailed analysis of German history and German thought, either political or metaphysical. Goldhagen is surely correct, however, when he ascribes the special urgency of 20th-century anti-Semitism not so much to be inherited, age-old racial phobias and superstitions as to "the modern indictment of the Jews as the principal driving force behind the relentless tide of modernity that was steadily eroding hallowed and time-honoured values and traditions.