The untold story of the three intelligent and glamorous young women who accompanied their famous fathers to the Yalta Conference in February 1945, and of the conference's fateful reverberations in the waning days of World War II.
Skillfully written and meticulously researched, it’s an extraordinary work that reveals the human side underlying the politics ... a thoroughly engrossing book, as acute about the contentious politics of the day as it is about the remarkable daughters who participated.
Katz centers the perspectives of these women in an intricately detailed history of the Yalta conference that presents its activities and negotiations from their positions on the fringes of the official business. Drawing on letters, diaries, and personal papers, she offers an intimate portrait of the networks of friendships, shared professional histories, and other links that were forged in Anglo-American diplomatic circles and which shaped the conference’s progress. Additionally, she shows how for the three daughters, like all who were touched by WWII, the conference and the war were transformative experiences. This work will appeal to readers intrigued by diplomatic history and the WWII era.3
The Daughters of Yalta is Katz’s first book, and she skillfully marshals diaries, letters, oral histories and memoirs to support her thesis that the pressures of wartime had warped normal familial bonds, so that the Western leaders’ relationships with their daughters had become more like those between business partners than between parent and child ... Light on political drama, this entertaining history is nevertheless packed with vivid personalities, jockeying aides and insider observations about a pivotal moment in history.
