Rating: 
Summary: A wretched, mechanical effort
Review: Again an "alternate history" imitating ours instead of enunciating real different possibilities. Having undertaken to expand a poignant short story into a novel, Turtledove ran short of filling. So, as in "The Great War" he has U.S. Socialists copying HTL German Socialists, here he puts Gorbachev and Yeltsin into brown shirts instead of biznes suits. Dr. Snappdove, you should be ashamed of yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: Along for the ride.
Review: Another alternate history from Harry Turtledove. In this one, the US never entered WWII. Result: Germany wins in Europe, then takes out the US in the 70's. Story takes place in 2010, when the Reich is the lone world-dominant superpower. Main characters are some Berliners who are secretly Jews.
The verdict on this one is "meh." The book's characters are engaging, and the story moves along (albeit slowly for the first 2/3).
I have two main problems with this book.
The first is that it gets repetitive. Time after time after time after time, some event happens that causes our Jewish protagonist to think to himself something along the lines of "...but if he knew what I was, it would be a trip to the showers for me." This sort of thing is presumably included to maintain the tension, the sense of living your entire life with a sword of Damocles under your head. And hey, I don't have anything against dramatic tension. But after the fifty-seventh repetition of this shtick, I just want to grab Mr. Turtledove by the throat and yell okay, okay, all right already, I get it, he's a cat on hot bricks, can we get on with things now?
The second is that events in the book just sort of sweep along with historical force and all the characters are merely observers, swept along in the tide. They have virtually no influence or real interaction with the "action" events of the book's story arc; they're just sort of along for the ride. And yes, in that situation, it makes sense that they *would* be just along for the ride... but that doesn't exactly make the book grab you by the throat. The characters are engagingly enough depicted that it's a mildly interesting ride, but the passivity becomes a drag after a while.
Rating:
Summary: not so original
Review: Gee, an Austrian named Kurt Haldweim is Fuhrer. Can't he come up with a more original name?Or the action at the end is taken straight from August 19, 1991 in Russia where Gorbachev is overthrown and Yeltsin climbs upon a tank and asks the crowd to defy the coup. Or the hit musical put on by two producers who want to close their theatre and so put on a horrible musical. It is a success and there now many companies putting on the play. It has all the originality of a poor high school level English class assignment. Glad I borrowed it from the library.
Rating: 
Summary: Read This Book!
Review: Harry Turtledove has long been one of my favorite authors. In the Presence of Mine Enemies does nothing to change his status in my mind. This is obviously a personally important labor of love for Mr. Turtledove, and it succeeds on many levels, while still being somewhat painful, and sometimes predictable on others. If is definately worth a read! In the Presence of Mine Enemies introduces us to Heinrich Gimpel, an economic analyst in the Oberkomanmando der Wehrmacht in 2010. He works on computing and projecting reparations payments from the United States (a German satellite state since the 3rd War). He works next to his best friend and bridge partner Willi Dorsch, whose' wife is trying to seduce him. Willi does not know that Heinrich and his family are Jews with doctored genealogies. The book follows the challenges of remaining secretly Jewish in a state where hatred of Jews is almost a state religion. Heinrich, his wife Lise and there extended family tell there daughter Alicia of there background, and her Jewishness, on her tenth birthday. The main theme after that are the struggles with her, and other family members, reactions to the various taunts and challenges to there hidden identities. This becomes even more difficult when Willies wife Erika becomes angry at Heinrichs' refusal to sleep with her and falsely accuses (she thinks!) him of being Jewish to the SS! This of course leads to the immediate arrest of him and his three daughters. All of these events are bordered by the beginning of the end of the Nazi era, with the selection of Heinz Buckliger as Fuhrer. His attempts to open up the society track to the collapse of the Soviet Empire, including a Boris Yeltsen equivalent. This was a solid, exciting read, though sometimes the "personnel awareness" asides threw me off a bit. I've read all of Wouk, and a lot of Leon Urus, so many of these themes are not new to me, although the exploration of Jewishness on the part of a 10 year old was a fresh approach. I have lived in California almost all my life, and was raised in Sherman Oaks, where most of my childhood friends were Jewish, so the whole concept of anti-Semitism as a socially acceptable philosophy was completely alien to me except through books until a few years ago when I moved to the Chicago area for work. We rented a house in Highland Park. When I mentioned this to acquaintances at my new job I was literally flabbergasted by the matter of fact derogatory comments they made about it being a Jewish neighborhood. That experience has taught me that this theme still needs to be explored further in popular literature, so hats off to Mr. Turtledove for tackling it!
Rating:
Summary: Turtledove's Best Since Guns Of The South
Review: Harry Turtledove has produced an alternate history novel which is his best since Guns of the South. Turtledove always does an impressive job with historical detail, but tends to focus on far too many characters with the result that his books like The Great War series tend to be historically fascinating but confusing to keep up with in the matter of who is doing what to whom. Fortunately he has limited his characters here and has taken the time to fully portray them as real people, not cardboard cutouts. In In The Presence of Mine Enemies, like The Guns of the South, Turtledove takes a fantastic premise, that the Third Reich won World Wars Two and Three and has lasted until about the year 2010, and makes it all too believable. We travel through the Nazified splendors of Berlin and hear as a matter of course of details like Omaha as the US capital (Washington was nuclear bombed in World War III circa 1970). Then we learn something even more fantastic, that all of Turtledove's major characters are Jews, living hidden, secret lives in the heart of Fascism. The shock is just as great as when the twenty-first century time travelers show up with Kalashnikovs at General Lee's encampment in Guns of the South. In writing this book Turtledove obviously drew on material from the last years of the Soviet Union, and it is easy to recognize which Nazi leader is patterned on which Soviet counterpart. The true main story, that of the hidden Jews and their constant fear of discovery, is totally original and completely absorbing. The book ends with a failed coup against a reforming Fuhrer, and those of us familiar with Russian history in the last ten years or so can guess what's coming next: turmoil, corruption, independence movements, fledgling attempts at democracies failing more often than succeeding, etc. What is less clear is how Turtledove's characters are going to survive all this, and whether they will ever be free to live openly as Jews once more. The book ends at a point which leaves the question of sequels open. I hope the answer will be yes.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: I don't know what else to say that hasn't been said, so I'll be brief. Turtledove is a great storyteller, and I usually feel sympathetic towards his characters, and these characters are no different. I enjoyed the beginning of the book that set up the story, and I enjoyed the plot device in which the beginnings of the crumbling of the Reich paralelled that of the crumbling of the Soviet Union. All of the other stuff in between left me fairly cold. Not Turtledove's best... but lets be honest, even this guy's so-so stuff is better than most of what is out there.
Rating:
Summary: self-contained thriller
Review: I enjoyed this book quite a bit - bought it about noon Friday and was done about 2 pm Saturday! After about 30 pages I thought I knew how it would end, but I was wrong. It is thick with the usual texture Mr. Turtledove provides. Unlike his Colonization or alternate Civil War series, he concentrates on a more narrow cast. While I hope there are other books in this universe, this is a self-containe story, so you won't need top wait a year or two to find out how it is resolved.
Read and enjoy!
Rating: 
Summary: Showed great promise, but fell far short of expectations
Review: I opened this book with great expectation, because I believed that it showed promise. Nazi Germany victorious! Nazi Germany in control of almost all the world from the United States to Britain. Even more interesting was the focal point of the book, how we see Jews passing themselves off as Aryans to survive in the heart of Nazi Germany. However, it soon became obvious that Turtledove was just simply repeating history, only this time it is not the USSR that is imploding, but Nazi Germany. Virtually everything that happened to the USSR happened to Nazi Germany. Both nations choose a moderate leader who wishes to change the system, and then both leaders forget that their power center is the capital, thus leaving the way open for a charismatic leader to take over. Finally, then is the coup that removes the leader to a remove location, only to fail as the capital rebels and seize control back from the conspirators. While this book did provide me with some entertainment, I cannot help but feel that Turtledove wasted what was a brilliant plot.
Rating:
Summary: Not one of his best efforts
Review: I was very excited to hear that Harry Turtledove was going to tackle the idea of a victorious Third Reich. I have read a number of his other books and have usually enjoyed them. Unfortunately, that was not the case here. This novel tediously plods on to an unsatisfactory conclusion. The author continually subjects the reader to countless hand by hand descriptions of bridge games between two couples that are boring and unnecessary. Perhaps this would appeal to a bridge enthusiast, which I am not. It seemed like filler to me. Or perhaps Harry is newly devoted to the game and couldn't contain his enthusiasm. One of the most galling incogruities in the book is using a Jewish computer hacker to spead the rumor that an SS man is Jewish in order to help quell a Putsch. All in all, a very unsatisfactory effort.
Rating:
Summary: In the Presence of Mediocricity
Review: I wholeheartedly support the purchase of a used paperback copy of this book. It isn't a bad book, Turtledove's writing, usually pretty gruesome, isn't bad. He manages to keep himself alive as the Master of Alternate History (A title which apparently noone else wants) through this novel. I found the Bridge Games fascinating, did they contain some clever metaphor that a Bridge player would understand? I'll never know, the book didn't make me care enough to learn Bridge. It's not bad... It's just not especially good. Turtledove's best book is Ruled Britannia, this one is second, a distant second since Britannia is an exceptional book. This book is profoundly mediocre.
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