Estimated reading time: 8 minutes Common-sense observers, most historians included, assert that the roots of World War II lay in the rubble of the Great War a quarter-century earlier. Most ascribe the fault to the draconian Treaty of Versailles that imposed such harsh terms on Germany, and that...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes No country in the world suffered greater devastation in World War II than Poland, not even the Soviet Union, where as many as twenty-seven million people died. Poland’s six million dead represented an even higher proportion of the pre-war population—about...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Holocaust tales abound in books and film alike. There’s no end to the gripping stories torn from diaries, the recollections of aging survivors, or the imaginations of talented novelists. Amazon alone lists more than 10,000 books on the Holocaust. Of course,...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Stories of the French Resistance crowd library shelves. They’re among the most popular books about World War II. But many give a misleading picture of reality. Only about 500,000 French men and women worked for the Resistance during the five years of the...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes London. 1952. Twelve years earlier, the United Kingdom had surrendered to Nazi Germany following a brief and humiliating war in Norway. Now, Prime Minister Lord Beaverbrook leads a cabinet that includes the Fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, in the critical post...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes Anti-Nazi resistance movements emerged in every country in Occupied Europe, including Germany itself. Historians rate the most effective of them to have been in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, there is little in print published in...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Working round the clock for sixteen days in October and early November 1943, a ragtag bunch of Belgian resisters staged one of the most audacious and innovative protests their Nazi overlords had ever experienced. No one blew up train tracks or assassinated an SS...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes From a distance of ninety years, it’s difficult for many Americans to understand how Adolf Hitler could have come to power in such a highly advanced and cultured country as Germany. And at the same time, many of us wonder why, with Hitler’s true...
Read More
Clichés abound in descriptions of World War II. After all, it was the greatest cataclysm in the history of the human race. And books about the events of 1937 to 1945 crowd library shelves throughout the English-speaking world. Amazon lists more than 6,000 titles, though that’s surely an...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes It’s one of the oddest Holocaust stories I’ve ever come across, but one that was exceedingly popular. More than 500 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Translated into 63 languages and selling 17 million copies. The Book Thief was an...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes When we think of the Warsaw Ghetto, our minds turn to the four months early in 1943 when starving Jews fought back against the Nazis with smuggled and makeshift weapons. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising vividly displayed heroism and desperation in equal measure, and it...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes For a majority of Americans, the events of June 6, 1944 represent the most important battle of World War II. Of course, the landings on D-Day and the campaign for Normandy that followed during the months of June, July, and August involved far, far more troops than...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes On May 10, 1940, two historic events grabbed the world’s attention. Hitler’s Panzer armies broke through the Belgian and Dutch frontiers. And King George VI asked Winston Churchill to form a new government. To tell the story of the eighty days that...
Read More
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Max Hastings has gained a reputation as one of Britain’s foremost military historians. Today, aged 77 as I write, he is best known as a commentator on television. But as a young man of 34 he wrote Bomber Command (1979) about the role of strategic bombing in...
Read More
A century ago in Italy, fascism began taking hold in much of Europe. Within a decade, illiberal and authoritarian political parties had moved into the mainstream, most prominently in Germany and Spain as well as Italy, Hungary, Greece, and Austria. Soon, the governments they led propelled the...
Read More
Alternate history is a curious branch of science fiction—or, perhaps more properly, of speculative fiction. Because the factors that limit the author’s imagination aren’t the boundaries of science but those of history itself: reality. To work, alternate history must be believable...
Read More
One of the lessons I learned very early in my three-decade-long career writing and editing fundraising appeals was that statistics numb the brain while a gripping tale of one individual can unlock torrents of emotion in the reader. So it was no surprise to me that the story of one young refugee...
Read More
Malcolm Gladwell is right. In his introduction to the 2023 reissue of Bomber, Len Deighton’s portrayal of a single RAF Bomber Command mission in World War II, he refers to the book as “one of the greatest British anti-war novels ever written.” I might go further. Surely, Bomber...
Read More
For most Americans, World War II was all about the war in the Pacific and what took place after the Allied invasions of Italy and northern France. But it was, of course, a global war. It lasted at least from 1937, when Japan invaded China, to 1945, when the Red Army occupied Berlin. And a great...
Read More
Yes, there was, indeed, a Soviet female sniper who gained fame in World War II. You may have come across mentions of her if you’ve read a lot about the war. She was Ukrainian, a fourth-year history student at Kiev University, and her name was Lyudmila Mikhailovich Pavlichenko (1916-74). She...
Read More
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.