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Recent Reviews
Richard Overy
Rave The New York Times Book Review Putin has proved the experts wrong. Still, let’s praise Overy’s stupendous achievement. Anybody interested in the why and how of boundless violence in the 20th century should make space for Blood and Ruins on his or her shelf. It will help you to grasp and revisit the carnage of 1931-45 as the largest event in human history. No continent, no ocean was spared, and Overy deftly weaves all the subplots into one planetary tapestry of merciless ideology and industrialized extermination. This book is not Eurocentric, but truly geocentric ... Blood and Ruins dissects the sinews of war with the sharpest of scalpels. With myriad facts, it is not for the night stand, where it must compete with Netflix. But it is history at its best, down to the finest points culled from a dozen archives around the world ... While watching the talking heads on CNN, keep this masterly work by your side.
Fareed Zakaria
Rave The New York Times ... employs a wide lens, drawing on governance, economics and culture. Call it \'applied history\' ... Having laid out a \'gloomy compendium of threats,\' Zakaria rightly celebrates \'our resilient world\' ... With his lively language and to-the-point examples, Zakaria tells the story well, while resisting boilerplate as served up by the left and the right. Nor does he spare his own liberal class, the \'meritocracy\' of the best educated and better off, which he fingers ever so gently as deepening the divide between urban and rural, elites and \'deplorables.\' He might have said a bit more about the uses and abuses of cultural hegemony that have driven hoi polloi into the arms of Donald Trump and triggered defections from the democratic left in Europe ... Both The Financial Times and Zakaria’s book urge a revolution already upon us, and probably represent today’s zeitgeist and reality ... read Ten Lessons. It is an intelligent, learned and judicious guide for a world already in the making.
Kim Ghattas
Rave The Wall Street Journal \"The book is packed with accounts of ambition, treachery and cruelty—with a wealth of historical detail down to the hour of the day ... She serves up a wealth of human interest wrapped in ambiance and atmosphere. She paints riveting portraits of the protagonists: the murderous zealots, and the reformers who preached moderation until they were exiled or murdered ... a superbly researched and subtly told story—current history at its best. \'Between despair and hope,\' Ms. Ghattas writes, \'I ultimately settled on hope.\' This blood-drenched plot deserves it. So, \'Amen\' and \'Inshallah.\'\
Victor Sebestyen
Rave The New York Times Book Review Can first-rate history read like a thriller? With Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror, the journalist Victor Sebestyen has pulled off this rarest of feats — down to the last of its 569 pages ... [Sebestyen has] a scriptwriter’s knack for drama and suspense that needs no ludicrous cliffhangers to enthrall history buffs and professionals alike.
Max Hastings
Rave The New York Times Book Review ...the book embodies a herculean research effort down to the minutest detail. Fear not. In spite of its heft, this tome is a real page turner. Screenwriters might cull a few thrillers from the text — and populate them with real-life heroes, fools and traitors ... For all its focus on the Anglo-American brotherhood, The Secret War also covers the whole front from the French and Dutch resistance to the German Abwehr and the Soviet NKVD. Like the rest, these chapters blend first-rate reportage, finely chiseled portraits and in-depth research. They brim with true tales of sacrifice and petty-­mindedness, miraculous breakthroughs and cynical betrayal.