The Second World War http://www.fishpond.com.au/Books/Second-World-War-Antony-Beevor/9780297844976

By Antony Beevor

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About the Author

Antony Beevor served as a regular officer in the 11th Hussars in Germany. He is the author of Crete - The Battle and the Resistance, which won a Runciman Prize, Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949 (written with his wife Artemis Cooper), Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, Berlin - The Downfall, which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees' Award, and The Mystery of Olga Chekhova. Stalingrad and Berlin have been translated into twenty-five languages and sold more than two and a quarter million copies between them. His latest work, A Writer at War - Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945, is an edition, with his Russian researcher, Dr Luba Vinogradova, of Grossman's wartime notebooks. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France, Antony Beevor has also been the chairman of the Society of Authors and is a visiting professor at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. He lives in London and Kent and has a daughter and a son. http://www.antonybeevor.com/ http://www.facebook.com/pages/Antony-Beevor https://twitter.com/antonybeevor http://www.youtube.com/user/antonybeevortest

Prizes

A magisterial, single-volume history of the greatest conflict the world has ever known by our foremost military historian

Reviews

His singular ability to make huge historical events accessible to a general audience recalls the golden age of British narrative history, whose giants include Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle. -- Boyd Tonkin THE INDEPENDENT Beevor can be credited with single-handedly transforming the reputation of military history. -- David Edgar THE GUARDIAN A truly outstanding historian of war -- Michael Howard STANDPOINT A British historian of great distinction and range, who ... demonstrates his mastery of his sources. -- Gordon Craig NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS his accounts of the key moments in the second world war have a sense of colour, drama and immediacy that few narrative historians can match -- Dominic Sandbrook THE SUNDAY TIMES 20120527 If you want to understand the war as military struggle, this book is all you really need. However well you thought you knew the subject, you will learn something new on every page. -- Neill Denny WE LOVE THIS BOOK online You feel yourself being carried along on the narrative flow, channelled this way and that through the pools and rapids by Beevor's expert helmanship. -- Patrick Bishop STANDPOINT 20120601 Brocaded with details of the great campaigns and thoughtful explanations of Hitler's murderous belligerence, The Second World War is an absorbing, unsparingly lucid work of military history. -- Ian Thomson THE SPECTATOR 20120602 The myriad pieces of this intricate kaleidoscope are pieced together with exemplary skill. -- Roger Moorhouse THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 20120603 This is a splendid book, erudite, with an admirable clarity of thought and expression. -- Roger Moorhouse THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 20120603 Beevor's book is a pleasure to read and an example of intelligent, lively historical writing at its best. -- Tony Barber THE FINANCIAL TIMES 20120603 Everyone who is interested in the Second World War should read this book. -- Laurence Rees WW2HISTORY.COM 20120604 This is as comprehensive and objective an account of the course of the war as we are likely to get, and the most humanly moving to date. -- John Gray NEW STATESMAN 20120611 The book that Beevor has been building towards writing - and everybody else has been anticipating reading. -- Donal O'Donoghue RTE GUIDE 20120602 remarkably well-written and informative -- Norman Stone LITERARY REVIEW 20120601 This is the place to begin if you need to get your knowledge of the war in order. -- Hew Strachan EVENING STANDARD 20120607 This is history writ large. -- James Owen THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH SEVEN Magazine 20120610 Beevor is excellent at catching the individual in the flood-tide of events. -- John Lewis-Stempel SUNDAY EXPRESS 20120610 The book could not really have been done better. MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY A magnificent performance - true excitement from one page to the next delivered in faultless prose. -- Christopher Silvester DAILY EXPRESS 20120615 the whole story told in the author's usual erudite yet highly readable prose DESPATCHES Magazine The heart of Beevor's appeal is precisely that straightforward narrative approach, coupled with his lively, engaging style and his use of memorable, almost cinematic, set-pieces. HISTORY TODAY 20120626 He is the most humanitarian of historians, and covers huge sweeps of history through the real stories of the individuals who experienced them. Reading this will be like having him walk me through the history of the war like a personal guide. -- Kate Mosse This is a book demanding to be read. -- Christopher Bray THE OXFORD TIMES 20120705 a masterly understanding of the conflict's many facets THE MAIL ON SUNDAY 20120715 For as harrowing and politically convoluted as the years 1939-1945 were, Beevor writes with such a panache and literary flair, that the reader is almost uncannily charged to keep turning the pages at a rate of ten by ten, twenty by twenty, chapter by chapter - until such point that s/he has stumbled upon the end as if by chance, as if by default. -- David Marx 20120716 By deploying his keen eye for tiny detail and penchant for story telling, and then marrying them both with an acute historical investigation, Antony Beevor has once again written a book that is simply superlative. -- David Marx 20120716 This imposing history can both be read as a whole or dipped into, and never fails to inform. WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? This book is a perfect mixture of world history and human experience, unbiased and highly readable. THE JOURNAL 20120714 As we have come to expect from this master, he excels at using eye-witness testimony to illustrate how mankind can be capable of both terrible cruelty and astonishing courage. -- Andrew Rawnsley THE OBSERVER 20121125 global history at its grandest and best THE DAILY TELEGRAPH 20121124 the most incredibly detailed research -- Chris Tarrant THE SUNDAY EXPRESS S MAGAZINE 20121202 a truly rewarding account of the global conflict. Beevor has a special gift for linking great events with individual testimony -- Amanda Foreman MAIL ON SUNDAY

Beevor successfully employs the format of his previous works on WWII (Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943) in this comprehensive capstone. His approach presents a kaleidoscope of individual experiences in a context of continuous choices. His subtext is a warning not to become overwhelmed by statistics and abstractions or by the notion that historical events are predetermined. WWII was "an amalgamation of conflicts" dating back as far as WWI and structured by "a cycle of resentments." But the war was set in motion by a single person-Adolf Hitler-and its extension reflected specific decisions by specific people, and its course changed lives across the globe in ways impossible to predict. Beevor supports these points through narrative that displays his particular strength for description-whether of fire-bomb raids, infantry combat, death camp routines, or high-level negotiations-in a page-turner. His command of a comprehensive spectrum of sources enables him to present the war from the perspective of its participants. And from heads of state to front-line riflemen, from field marshals to teenaged girls, Beevor's protagonists exercise choice in the context of "the greatest man-made disaster in history." Hypocrisy and self-sacrifice, corruption and idealism, sadism and compassion, genocide and cannibalism: Beevor brilliantly shows, at all levels, that WWII defies easy generalization. 32 pages of b&w photos, 23 maps. Agent: Andrew Nurnberg, Andrew Nurnberg Associates (U.K.) (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

This latest work by prize-winning historian Beevor (D-Day: The Battle for Normandy) is magisterial in both scope and breadth. Many one-volume World War II histories fail either to grab the attention of the reader or to provide new insights; this is not the case here. Covering both theaters of the war, the causes of the conflict, and some of the immediate aftermath, Beevor provides a strategic overview of the war while adding personal stories and details that keep the book fresh. His approach considers World War II as the global conflict it was (e.g., his discussion of the Russo-Japanese battle of Nomohan), rather than as simultaneous yet separate conflicts, as so many other authors have presented it. He begins with the tale of Yang Kyoungjong, a Korean national who ended up fighting in the armies of Japan, the USSR, and Germany. VERDICT Beevor provides a stimulating and informative book recommended for all general readers.-BKD (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.