History on Trial Reviewed in (Washington's) The Weekly Standard

There is a review of History on Trial in this week's issue of The Weekly Standard. The full review is only available to subscribers, but here is an excerpt:

The Standard Reader
Deborah E. Lipstadt's History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving.
1/7/2006 12:05:00 AM, Volume 011, Issue 17

Books in Brief

History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving by Deborah E. Lipstadt (Ecco, 368 pp., $25.95).

Before long the generation of eyewitnesses who survived Hitler's war against the Jews will pass on, thus removing an obstacle to Holocaust deniers. Fortunately, they suffered a setback when Deborah Lipstadt was awarded damages from David Irving in a London courtroom in April 2000. Irving, a prominent World War II historian (at least until the aftermath of the trial) had sued Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin UK, for defamation following the publication of her Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993). In her book, Lipstadt called Irving one of the most dangerous spokesmen of the Holocaust denial movement.

The ensuing trial attracted a great deal of attention, as a judgment for Irving might have emboldened the Holocaust deniers who claim that the genocide of European Jewry was a hoax. Irving, among his other claims, had declared that there were no gas chambers (he once stated that "more people had died in the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz"), nor was there a systematic extermination of 5 to 6 million Jews, and he absolved Hitler of any involvement in the Holocaust.

History on Trial is Lipstadt's riveting account of the trial. [...]