RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewAs Moorhouse helps us to see in this exemplary military history, to begin at the beginning of the war reveals where choices were made, and how they mattered ... Moorhouse’s main argument, which is unanswerable, is that the campaign in Poland was a real war. It was not the \'phony war\' or \'dróle de guerre\' of British and French memory ... The heart of this book is the description of the fighting, which is about as good as military history can be. Moorhouse has visited the places he writes about, and understands weaponry, tactics and the structures of the German and Polish armed forces ... Moorhouse uses personal accounts from Poles and Germans to great effect, bringing battlefields, burning towns and cities and even the strafed countryside into clear view ... Like all good histories, Moorhouse’s answers an old question and raises a new one. This book, although it fills a historical gap in a way that many Polish readers will find satisfying, also challenges the way that official Poland today remembers the war. If Poles were able to make choices in the terrible circumstances of 1939, as Moorhouse shows, one can reasonably ask about the choices they made before then.
Anne Applebaum
RaveThe Washington PostAs The Post’s Anne Applebaum reveals in Red Famine, Stalin and the Soviet leadership enforced policies that ensured that the disaster was worst in Ukraine ... Applebaum demonstrates that the causes of the great famine of 1933 were also national and political ...prodigious original research... Her account will surely become the standard treatment of one of history’s great political atrocities ...re-creates a pastoral world so we can view its destruction. And she rightly insists that the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian peasants was part of a larger policy against the Ukrainian nation ...remarkable book.
Peter Fritzsche
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAn Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler” is a work of deep reflection by an experienced historian rather than an attempt to capture the history of World War II from any particular angle. Still, his announced theme — the moral challenges of the war for civilians in Europe — gives way at the beginning to set pieces on other subjects: the ones, the reader suspects, that Fritzsche finds most interesting. It is a pleasure to follow along ... Fritzsche patiently analyzes long conversations among civilians who had time to talk: the British on the home front, the French during the 'phony war' of 1939-40 and then under occupation. Even the Germans spent 10 years under Hitler before the war really hit home, and even German Jews, at least by comparison with other Jews, had a great deal of time to contemplate the Nazis ... This is a general problem with Fritzsche’s approach as applied to the East: Death came quickly, and in stupefying numbers, and to people who did not speak the Western languages in which the history of the war is largely written...to reach these interesting moments, Fritzsche has to send his Western Europeans east; and the perspective in question is always theirs ... His book is assembled from hundreds of quotations, and takes the form of a series of essays that only with a certain amount of generosity can be read as chapters. He makes no claim to have said anything in general about war and occupation. And yet, in the end, he has.
