About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Katja Hoyer
Rave The Telegraph (UK) \"It is not an easy message to get across, but Hoyer is uniquely placed to do it. Just four-years-old when the Berlin Wall fell, and now resident in Britain, she shares the frustration of Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, when details of her early life in East Germany are dismissed as irrelevant. It helps that she’s a historian of immense ability whose early promise has been more than fulfilled with this brilliant follow-up to her debut Blood and Iron. Exhaustively researched, cleverly constructed and beautifully written (in her second language), this much needed history of the GDR should be required reading across her homeland.\
Richard Overy
Rave The Times (UK) \"One flaw in Overy’s theory is that it underplays the significance of communism—or rather a fear of it—in both the rise of fascism and the failure of the western democracies to challenge the aggressors until it was too late ... For the years 1939-1945, Overy provides ten themed chapters that cover subjects as diverse as imperial fantasies, mobilisation for total war, methods of fighting, economic warfare, morality and war neuroses. Hardly a sentence is wasted as the author distils years of scholarship into these tightly focused essays, each of which can stand alone, but together provide a compelling survey of the conflict ... Historians tend to specialise. Rarely do they write as authoritatively as Overy does in fields as diverse as diplomacy, economics, battlefield tactics and war crimes. In almost every paragraph there is a telling phrase or statistic ... Overy has written many fine books, but Blood and Ruins is his masterpiece. At almost 1,000 pages, it puts all previous single-volume works of the conflict in the shade. \
Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman
Positive The Times (UK) One benefit of such a tightly focused analysis is that it reminds us that contingency is ever-present in our history and traditional narratives are often written with the benefit of hindsight ... By unfolding the story in real time, the authors are able to emphasise the contingency of the decision-making process. The drawback of this constantly shifting narrative—across cities and even continents—is that the reader is often left confused, even seasick from the back and forth. There are, however, some telling anecdotes.
Daniel James Brown
Positive The Times (UK) This is [Brown\'s] first stab at military history and for the most part he makes a decent fist of it. He concentrates on the experiences of four young Nisei: three who fought in the 442nd and one who refused to accept relocation. This allows him to personalise and juxtapose both sides of this extraordinary story: the appalling wartime treatment of Japanese-Americans; and the heroism in combat of thousands of young Nisei as they strove to prove they were as patriotic and selfless as their fellow countrymen. The dreadful conditions experienced by 110,000 Japanese-Americans in the hastily-built \'assembly centers\' in Washington, Oregon, California and Arizona are graphically portrayed ... Brown has followed in the footsteps of his subjects and writes the combat scenes well, if a little breathlessly ... hyperbole is a shame because the story, plainly told, is compelling enough ... Yet overall, the author is to be congratulated for bringing to life the story of these \'forgotten heroes\' of the Second World War, while their families suffered discrimination and humiliation in the US.