PositiveNew York Times Book Review... thorough and well-researched ... Kochanski is careful to note that the rise of resistance was never steady or linear ... How much did resistance forces contribute to winning the war? The obvious temptation for the author of a book like this is to play up the impact of all the human bravery it depicts. Kochanski resists it ... Kochanski tells this story effectively on the basis of deep research (although almost entirely in English-language sources). Her long book is always interesting and readable, sensitive to the powerful human drama it presents ... Often, however, Kochanski undermines the depth of her research through her rigid way of thinking about it. The most glaring example is her exclusion of German internal resistance from the story. Kochanski tells us she wants to write a .balanced. portrait of all European resistance that avoids the .pitfalls of nationalism.. But she also tells us that since Germany was neither invaded nor occupied, .there was nothing to resist\'...This is nonsense ... Still, this is an instructive book ... One does not need to listen too closely to detect the melancholy echoes in our own time.
Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... absorbing ... The greatest strength of Simms and Laderman’s book is its success in accomplishing something supremely difficult: It reminds us how contingent even the most significant historical events can be, how many other possibilities lurked beyond the familiar ones that actually happened—and how even the greatest leaders often have only a shaky grasp of what is happening ... The other thing the book does effectively is to pay careful attention to how the timing of events played out around the world, especially in the pattern of reactions to Pearl Harbor ... Simms and Laderman give us a visceral sense of these events as they unfolded, in real time, with historical actors not always quite sure what was happening—a dimension of history that is both crucial and fiendishly difficult to recover.
