Rating: 
Summary: Class dismissed, with snort
Review: Stephen Fry is mad as hell and he's not going to take it any more. Or is this book a satire? It's hard to tell. Anyway, he seems to have it in for sophomoric graduate students such as the putative hero Michael Young, the student's girlfriend, flunkies of various sorts, pompous professors, unaccountably gullible FBI agents, German militarists, and the village of Brunau-am-Inn, Adolf Hitler's birthplace. The main characters are so strange, to say the least, that Hitler himself tends to get lost in the shuffle. The action oscillates between tragedy and slapstick comedy. Young, a schlemiel, accidentally spills some male sterilization pills that his chemist girlfriend happens to have left lying around in her laboratory. He steals them and, with the help of a friend's handy time machine, engages in a little trans-temporal terrorism, poisoning the water supply of Brunau 10 months before Hitler was to be conceived. I suppose we should be glad he doesn't rifle his girlfriend's desk drawers; he might discover even worse weapons of mass destruction, like a cache of atomic hand grenades. Logically, "Making History" makes no sense. Young is catapulted into an alternate timeline where Hitler never existed. Orthodox time-travel theory prescribes that he stay home and somehow communicate with his new alter ego, but ours not to reason why. The Hitlerless timeline turns out to be even worse than our own: Rudolf Glober, just as diabolical as Hitler and twice as smart, founds the Nazi party and conquers Europe by playing all his cards impossibly right. And that's the book's fatal flaw: Glober is a fictional character, and his success in outdoing Hitler is unbelievable. If Fry wished to show that Nazism was historically inevitable, his creating Glober out of whole cloth proves the opposite by lending credence to Hitler's essential role in creating the Third Reich and, thereby, to the "great man" theory of history. For a better-conceived and historically more interesting treatment of the subject, albeit with situations, heroes and villains reminiscent of James Bond films, I recommend James P. Hogan's "The Proteus Operation."
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting speculation but nothing new
Review: British author Stephen Fry is most well known as actor who has appeared in "Blackadder", "Jeeves & Wooster" and "Peter's Friends." Making History, however, is his third novel, so he can be considered something of a novelist as well. This particular novel is an alternate history, although Fry classifies it as an alternate reality.
Michael D. "Puppy" Young is a graduate student reading history at Cambridge. His recently finished thesis is on the childhood of Adolf Hitler, a person who has always fascinated Young, not because of who he was, but because of the simple coincidence that they were both born on April 20. A chance meeting with Leo Zuckerman, a refugee whose father was at Auschwitz, provides the impetus of the adventure. Zuckerman has a feeling about Young and shows him a device that Zuckerman has invented which can transmit shadowy images from the past. Zuckerman has it tuned to the day his father arrived at Auschwitz. The two men work to build a transmitter so they can send a permanent male contraceptive pill which Young's girlfriend has developed, to poison the water supply in Brunau, in time to stop Adolf Hitler from being born. The first half of the novel, which sets the scene, varies between being tedious and interesting. Several of the chapters show Hitler's parents or Hitler in World War I and introduce us to a person who will figure prominently in the second part of the novel, Rudolf Gloder. Strangely enough, the interesting parts cannot be said to belong only to the present-day sequences or the historical sequences. They vary without regard to the characters. One of the techniques which Fry uses repeatedly, however, writing three of the chapters as movie scripts, is probably where the novel bogged down the most, especially the final segment where Fry began introducing a lot of background and action which was not germane to the plot, or even a strong sub-plot. The second half of the novel is when Fry really hits his stride. Apparently successful in ridding the world of Adolf Hitler, Young has found himself as an American student at Princeton. Much of this part of the book is spent with Young trying to figure out who he is and later, what the history of this new twentieth century is. As with the first section of the book, Fry returns to World War I and we get to witness Rudi Gloder's rise in the absence of Adolf Hitler. Very little that Fry does is unique or surprising to anyone who has read a fair amount of alternate history. This novel, however, is being marketed in the mainstream, however, and will hold a certain amount of appeal to the readership which found Harris's Fatherland an intriguing read. Fry does handle his material well, and even if he doesn't deliver many full-fledged surprised, the moment when the reader realizes where Fry is going with the pieces of the novel is worth the price of admission.
Rating: 
Summary: It's a pants of a read.
Review: Who else could include the lyrics of Noel Gallagher, use the 'c' word with effortless charm and dismantle European history without sounding like a pompous old fart trying to catch the zeitgeist? Stephen Fry's 'Making History' is probably his best novel to date. It's a pants of a read.
The fiendishly clever circular plot weaves a story of breathtaking originality only to bite it's own tail in a brilliant piece of intellectual experiment. What if the most evil man this century were to disappear from our history books? He investigates this premise and delivers a comedy so black you'll wonder who turned the lights out.
His protagonist, Michael Young (who is of course as gay as a basket of tulips) starts out in Fry's now customary Cambridge academic landscape as a postgraduate about to complete his History thesis (Das MeisterwerK). A chance meeting with Leo Zuckerman, a Physics scholar eventually sees Michael thrown across the Atlantic into an alternative reality, Princeton USA. Here he encounters bigotry, racism and a government still frozen by cold war - only this time the enemy is Europe. It's here, in the second half of the novel that Fry really burns rubber, reinforcing Bernard Shaw's notion that England and America are indeed divided by a common language. Apart from the obvious gag count it is the points in the book when you realise what the author is up to that really provide the memorable moments.
Genius or smart arse git? He is of course both.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece of fact and fiction knitted together by Mr Fry
Review: If Evelyn Waugh had been alive in 1997 then Brideshead Revisited might well have been called Making History. It is a love story of immense proportions which spans two distantly related times/futures with the usual mix of Cambridge geography and Trefusian humour.
Loved it to bits, made me wish I liked snails as well as oysters!
Personally I thought it was better than The Liar!
Mark Greenfiel
Rating:
Summary: Virtual history becomes virtual fiction
Review: Stephen Fry departs from his usual barrels of laughs to take on the more thought-provoking question of whether it's possible to change history. Michael Young, a fledgling Cambridge historian on the verge of submitting a doctoral thesis on the early life of Adolph Hitler, becomes embroiled (via a misplaced parcel and a chance meeting) in a scheme to change history as we know it. Unfortunately, Young and his mentor quickly discover that history is not quite as staightforward as it might appear. Fry neatly sidesteps the technical stuff and constructs a convincing alternative present in which, despite his hero's best intentions, things have not entirely gone as planned. In the process he leads us to question the very factors at work in the historical process. Perservering through the somewhat confusing early chapters brings the reader rich rewards in the shape of a thought-provoking, and ultimately unsettling, tale. Fry reveals that in a world contingent on unforeseen (and unforeseeable) events, there are no easy solutions. The moral is an old one, but nonetheless valid: be careful what you wish for - it might just come true
Rating:
Summary: Decent read for a transtlantic flight, or the beach
Review: A tall tale, cheerfully spun out, of a couple of Cambridge (UK) academics who use a time machine to improve world history by deleting Hitler, only to make things worse than ever. For those who've read much science fiction, the alternate history theme -- what would happen if you could go back in time and alter historical events? -- is hardly novel. Nevertheless, the premise is worked out skilfully, and the novel is a fast lively read, with an engaging main character, clever story twists (e.g. imagining Hitler as a child), and reasonably good writing. The other reviews I read here, however, led me to expect more; I found the book funny and clever at times, but not particularly witty, and far from brilliant. All in all, a pretty good yarn with enought intellectual content to make you think -- but not too hard.
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