The Germans

-This study is particularly brilliant, even for the great Elias. In it he returns to the shame analysis that he began in The Civilizing Process, clarifying great swaths of German and European cultural history. A must for your reading list. -Thomas J. Scheff -University of California, Santa Barbara -Elias's magnum opus . . . Having read it, no one will say again that the awkward gap between the 'bird's eye view' and the insider's experience of society cannot be bridged, that the tortured ways of history cannot be both explained and understood. -Zygmunt Bauman -author of Modernity and the Holocaust -This insightful work . . . has much to say about Germany. But it also has much to point out about other nations, especially the emerging democracies of central and eastern Europe, which have a lot to learn about nation-building. -Christian Science Monitor