A powerful capsule history of World War II, chilling and reflective in one breath.
A visually engaging and highly atmospheric overview of World War II, including the runup and the fallout.
This is an impressively smart historical survey of World War II: condensed, but complex without being labyrinthine; smooth in its delivery without being trivial. It comfortably merges a political overview with snapshots and film of military action, gratifying both those who gain most from the written narrative and those who like a visual prod to the proceedings. The war is broken down into absorbable chunks, starting with World War I’s unfinished business, through the Japanese invasion of China—the story moves fluidly between the European and Pacific theaters—the blitzkrieg and the homefront. It covers the military campaigns from North Africa to Guadalcanal, Stalingrad to the Coral Sea. The user experience is easy and intuitive—well-organized, clean screens are active but not numbingly so, and there are toolbars for hopping about. Visual cues indicate when more material can be accessed by a swipe of the screen. There are plenty of brief film clips, chosen with finesse, and with their sepia tone or grainy, gray look, they send readers back 70 years in a flash. They wed the fleetness of a footnote to the most pungent visual imagery: One moment you are in the cockpit of a Stuka dive bomber, the next you are looking down at the dock of the Nuremberg trials. What gives the story so much texture, though, is the inclusion of less-notorious moments in the war, such as the Russian-Finnish conflict, helping to paint the big picture in all its swarming complexity.
A powerful capsule history of World War II, chilling and reflective in one breath.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Internet Design Zone
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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