{"id":2291,"date":"2021-07-24T12:06:58","date_gmt":"2021-07-24T11:06:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=2291"},"modified":"2021-07-24T12:06:58","modified_gmt":"2021-07-24T11:06:58","slug":"review-why-the-germans-do-it-better-by-john-kampfner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/review-why-the-germans-do-it-better-by-john-kampfner\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Why the Germans Do it Better, by John Kampfner"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>First of all, they don&#8217;t.  It&#8217;s a provocative title for a book, but ultimately a silly one &#8212; and it&#8217;s not what the book is really about.  John Kampfner offers a wide-ranging view of Germany today (and by today, I really mean today: the book was updated earlier this year).  When he makes the case that Germany does some things better, he means that in comparison to the UK.  Kampfner is a critic of Brexit and Boris Johnson (and rightly so) and yes, Germany&#8217;s continued support for the European project is better than Britain&#8217;s withdrawal from it, and Angela Merkel is a far more serious political leader than Johnson.  But on the rare occasion that he compares Germany to other European countries (e.g. the Nordic countries), it&#8217;s not always clear that Germany is doing anything better.  And while Kampfner doesn&#8217;t ignore the rise of xenophobia, racism and even anti-Semitism in Germany today, I don&#8217;t think he places enough emphasis on it.  Still, it&#8217;s a very well-written and informative book, but it would have served better by a different title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>First of all, they don&#8217;t. It&#8217;s a provocative title for a book, but ultimately a silly one &#8212; and it&#8217;s not what the book is really about. John Kampfner offers a wide-ranging view of Germany&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2292,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2291"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2293,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291\/revisions\/2293"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}