I both read and listened to this book on tape (it's 57 hours long, for those of you who are curious). I never truly understood what people meant when they referred to a book as being a "definitive account" of something- but this work is exactly that.
Told with an air of objective distance, the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, will forever provide background to my understanding of the geographical, sociological, economic and even psychological underpinnings of WWII and has fundamentally shifted my understanding of history and the world we live in.