PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. McKay’s rich narrative and descriptive gifts provide us with an elegant yet unflinching account of that terrible night. Leaning on eyewitness accounts and memoirs, material he arranges with skill and sensitivity, he brings us unnervingly close to the visceral horror of the firestorm, while devoting due attention to the fears and moral conflicts affecting the British and American attackers, from the bomber crews to the senior commanders. He also describes the clearing and the eventual rebuilding of the city, which, from May 1945, was first occupied by the Soviet army, then administered by the Stalinist regime’s German minions ... If there is a perspective, or partial perspective, not fully present in this otherwise excellent book, it is perhaps a political one ... As for the large, highly aggressive, anti-Islamic marches, organized by a group known as Pegida, that have disfigured the city’s political landscape for some years now, making it a notorious breeding-ground for far-right extremism—including latterly, openly anti-Semitic and antidemocratic agitation as well—Mr. McKay does not mention these at all ... is nonetheless to be recommended as a very readable and finely crafted addition to the literature on one of modern history’s most morally fraught military operations.
Andrew Nagorski
RaveThe Wall Street JournalThe Nazi Hunters, [Nagorski's] vivid, reader-friendly account of how justice was done (and, as much to the point, not done) after World War II takes us up to the present day, tackling this long and sometimes tortuous story with a blessed avoidance of the lurid excess sometimes attached to 'Nazi hunter' dramas ... Mr. Nagorski’s fine book is comprehensively informative and a highly involving read. There may be those for whom it is not quite sensational enough. Well, for them there is always fiction.
