A brilliant, mildly controversial interpretation of the history, conduct, and aftermath of WWII.
More than 1,000 pages on World War II might seem overkill, but not for one of the world’s leading military historians.
Overy disagrees with “the conventional view of the war,” which portrays “Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese military as causes of crisis rather than its effects, which is what they were.” He emphasizes that historians describe World War I as the outcome of a 19th-century global imperial order dominated by the British and French and opposed by Germany, which considered itself a “have-not” nation whose survival depended on “conquering additional imperial zones of its own.” Few readers will quarrel with that assessment, but they may be surprised with the author’s startling yet persuasive argument that the same description applies to WWII. The 1920s featured three unhappy nations—Germany, Japan, and Italy—who felt that their national identities were in danger unless they could expand their influences. First off the mark was Japan, which invaded China in 1931. Meanwhile, viewing the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa as steppingstones to a new Roman Empire, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Overy emphasizes that Hitler had no intention of conquering the world. His view was that Germany, “as a vigorous, progressive and cultured people, lacked sufficient territory to…nourish a growing population.” Annexing Austria, the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia were acts of an energetic imperial nation, and it was no secret that Poland was next. Still, Hitler expressed surprise when Britain and France declared war. A master of technical detail, Overy summarizes the campaigns but concentrates on the backgrounds and decisions of the leaders who, despite rhetoric about freedom, found themselves in a high-tech imperialistic war. Victory occurs halfway through, and the author devotes the remaining chapters to other relevant imperial issues: Britain’s, France’s, and Holland’s violent efforts to preserve their empires did not peter out until the 1960s; China suffered civil war; and Stalin brutally took control of Eastern Europe.
A brilliant, mildly controversial interpretation of the history, conduct, and aftermath of WWII.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48943-7
Page Count: 1152
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.
A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.
Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798228309890
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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