Mr. Overy’s imperial emphasis does, at times, play down the role of ideology ... Blood and Ruins is a monumental work; it is hard to imagine that a more comprehensive study of World War II could possibly be contained between two covers. Richard Overy has given us a powerful reminder of the horror of war and the threat posed by dictators with dreams of empire. And, despite his emphasis on the combatants’ hunger for territory and the supposed prestige it could bring, Mr. Overy does not neglect the awful human suffering of the war, particularly on the Eastern front.

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.

In his latest book, Overy reprises, updates and expands his coverage of the war. His masterly synthesis of the war’s vast literature and sources has never been bettered. The text may be long but it is unflagging and consistently illuminating. Overy’s narrative is enlivened by personal accounts of the wartime experience and the book’s many statistics tell their own story ... Since no war’s consequences were more devastating or far-reaching than the second World War the idea the conflict must have had equally profound causes is intuitively appealing. But Overy provides abundant evidence that both world wars were the result of chance, contingency, accident and personality.

Richard Overy is the master historian of the Second World War and of what he calls the 'morbid age' that preceded it. This book is his magnum opus (in every sense of the phrase). It is a commanding global history of the conflict that brings together its geopolitical and geostrategic elements with a stringent analysis of its many dimensions ... One of the many virtues of Blood and Ruins is to force us to question why a war on such an enormous scale and of such appalling barbarity should have broken out at this particular moment in world history ... The first three chapters could stand alone as a history of the war. It would be difficult to overstate the brilliance with which argument and insight are interwoven in a fast-paced narrative. If the outline is familiar, Overy constantly illuminates, adjusts and sometimes challenges our conventional notions ... The reader may not agree with all his asides ... But these are niggles. Overy’s narrative of the war, with its careful attention to the uneasy relations and different priorities of both the Axis and Anglo-American alliances, its evocation of the individual human experience, and its skilful combination of battlefield detail and the 'global' picture, is extraordinarily compelling, and written with remarkable fluency.

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.

The data, information and insights that Mr Overy musters can occasionally seem overwhelming, but even the most expert reader will emerge knowing more. In his penultimate chapter, he enumerates the crimes and atrocities of the war. It is a tough read ... At the end, he gallops through the events in the decade after 1945 that shaped the world as it is today. Were the old empires simply replaced by new American and Soviet imperiums? Mr Overy concludes not, though his view that Soviet domination of the Eastern bloc lacked the essential characteristics of an empire is not wholly convincing. That is a minor criticism. This is a magnificent book that reflects the deep scholarship and humane judgment of a magisterial historian.

The data, information and insights that Mr Overy musters can occasionally seem overwhelming, but even the most expert reader will emerge knowing more. In his penultimate chapter, he enumerates the crimes and atrocities of the war. It is a tough read. The capacity of apparently ordinary people to do the most terrible things should no longer come as a surprise, but the extent of barbarous inhumanity remains hard to comprehend ... At the end, he gallops through the events in the decade after 1945 that shaped the world as it is today. Were the old empires simply replaced by new American and Soviet imperiums? Mr Overy concludes not, though his view that Soviet domination of the Eastern bloc lacked the essential characteristics of an empire is not wholly convincing. That is a minor criticism. This is a magnificent book that reflects the deep scholarship and humane judgment of a magisterial historian.

... a real tour de force on World War II ... Overy offers original insights into the colonial policies of each Axis power and how they tried to establish political control and conduct economic exploitation of their new conquests, with minimal success in most cases ... stands apart for its unique observations and analysis of the war, focusing much more on both its origins and effects while scrutinizing many under investigated aspects of its conduct. Although it is a mighty tome at over 800 pages of narrative, even for the most ardent student of the war, it offers a fresh perspective that makes it well worth the investment.

A master of technical detail, Overy summarizes the campaigns but concentrates on the backgrounds and decisions of the leaders who, despite rhetoric about freedom, found themselves in a high-tech imperialistic war ... A brilliant, mildly controversial interpretation of the history, conduct, and aftermath of WWII.

... a dazzling if overstuffed reassessment of WWII ... Some of these discussions—about the conduct of civil defense, for example—grow tedious, and a chapter documenting 'crimes and atrocities' committed by both sides of the conflict is more numbing than enlightening. Still, Overy’s reframing of WWII as the last gasp of imperialism is astute and incisive. WWII buffs should consider this a must-read.