An original exploration of some of the formative influences in Hitler's life--the books he most revered, and how they shaped the man and his thinking. Hitler's education and worldview were formed largely from the books in his private library. Recently, hundreds of those books were discovered in the Library of Congress by Timothy Ryback, complete with Hitler's marginalia on their pages--underlines, question marks, exclamation points, scrawled comments. Ryback traces the path of the key phrases and ideas that Hitler incorporated into his writing, speeches, conversations, self-definition, and actions. In the process, he demonstrates the ability of books to preserve in vivid ways the lives of their collectors.