The first, as Haffner's son notes in an afterword, is to provide persuasive answers to questions that continue to pit thinking Germans against their parents and grandparents: "How were the Nazis possible?' and Why didn't you stop them?' " A second accomplishment is to present a series of vignettes that vividly convey the texture of life under an emerging totalitarian regime.
This is a brilliant, informed, and persuasive set of questions -- what ifs -- that if we fail to answer correctly, we put the lives of our children and grandchildren, indeed our planet, at risk.
Even if the new pictures prove persuasive, the big question is likely to remain: Will their deaths weaken the violent resistance to American soldiers?
Fortunately, Stowe's answer to the question was persuasive.
But who could argue with the idea that "status and influence" is the most persuasive answer to the question of what Trident is for?
And the advice about "how to maneuver on top of a moving train and get inside," though thoroughly persuasive, raises a disturbing question: how did you get up there in the first place?
Or it could fail to offer a persuasive answer to the question "Who needs it?" A conversation between two technology reporters for The New York Times, Matt Richtel and Katie Hafner, offers support for either prospect.
Mr. Akers has performed a valuable service for both the artist and the public in presenting a persuasive answer to the question that still plagues art that creates events and experiences rather than paintings and sculptures: Is it really art at all?
The Clinton side has not had a persuasive response to the question of what would have happened if voters had learned of the new e-mails from Fox News or the Times, rather than from Comey, other than to decry the existence of leaks.
In an interview about his novel Un Lun Dun (Del Rey/Ballantine, cloth, $17.95; paper, $9), China Miéville provides a far more persuasive answer to my question: in the books he writes for adults, Miéville says, "I couldn't use a character with a bottle of ink for a head".
