star demagogue. The significance of some details in these past scenes only becomes clear much later. For example, there is an early scene where Hitler's mother's vomits when trying to draw water and getting out of the pump a stinking maggot-filled mass; this turns out at the book's end to be the result of the protagonist sending back in time the rotting bodies of dead rats in order to prevent Hitler's father from drinking the sterilizing water. Reception Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times found the comic tone of the book "shockingly tasteless" and "deeply offensive" given the subject matter. Israeli researcher Asaf Ben Vered noted that "The protagonist of Making History gets told that "There are no Jews left in Europe". That result could not have been achieved solely by sterilizing Jewish men through the "Braunau Water". In that case, in the 1990s there should have still been a big number of sad old and middle aged Jews with no progeny, and the Nazis could not have kept them completely hidden from the world. Plus, if only Jewish men were sterilized, at least some Jewish women would have let themselves be impregnated by non-Jewish men; in fact, Jewish religious law specifically stipulates that such children would be considered Jewish. (...) Anyway, why would Gloder do it at all? To be sure, he is an anti-semite, like many Germans of his time. But as seen from his cynically frank wartime diary, he is above all a completely ruthless and totally unprincipled opportunist, for whom German Nationalism and wartime heroism are simply tools to be used or discarded. He needed the Jewish nuclear scientists to develop nuclear bombs by 1938. He still needs them when entering a nuclear arms race with the US. Were the Jewish scientists and their families exempted from deportation to the "Jewish Free State"? Would they go on working for him when all other Jews were deported? (...) The book avoids the real moral dilemma which it could have easily posed and which would have made it a far more profound and thought-provoking work. Suppose the opportunist Gloder had altogether avoided the Final Solution, and contented himself with some anti-Jewish rhetoric. Which world would be worse? Our world - or a world with an entrenched Nazi dictatorship in Europe and a racist and homophobic America, but no gas chambers and ovens, six million Jews able to