Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and lives in Selma, California.
"The Second World Wars is a monumental, riveting, and illuminating
reappraisal of the first - and hopefully the last - truly global
conflict, full of exceptional insights from one of America's
greatest living historians. Victor Davis Hanson's account provides
an exceptional retrospective on the wars in which a staggering 60
million people perished before the Allies prevailed."--General
David Petraeus (US Army, Ret.), former commander of the Surge in
Iraq, US Central Command, and coalition forces in Afghanistan and
former Director of the CIA
"The Second World Wars is an outstanding work of historical
interpretation. It is impossible to do justice to such a
magnificent book in a short review. Given the vast quantities of
ink expended on accounts of this great conflict, one would think
that there was not much more left to say. Hanson proves that this
belief is wrong. His fresh examination of World War II cements his
reputation as a military historian of the first order."--National
Review
"The Second World Wars offers an incisive tale for our age of
globalization. Yet it is rooted in timeless truths. That is no
surprise because Victor Davis Hanson is our greatest historian of
western warfare from its origins in ancient Greece. Nobody writes
military history like Hanson."--Barry Strauss, author of The Death
of Caesar: The Story of History's Greatest Assassination
"[The Second World Wars] is a brilliant and very original and
readable work by a great military historian and contemporary
commentator."--New Criterion
"[The Second World Wars] is written in an energetic and engaging
style. Mr. Hanson provides more than enough interesting and
original points to make this book essential reading. One thing
becomes increasingly clear: The complex of conflicts between 1937
and 1945, because of their unprecedented reach and their death blow
to colonialism, brought world history together for the first
time."--Wall Street Journal
"[Hanson's] insights into the international reach of the conflict
are very much worth reading, and in this book as in all his others,
the reading momentum never flags."--Open Letters Monthly
"[Hanson's] organizational approach allows him to isolate and
highlight observations that may surprise even some well-read WWII
enthusiasts."--Publishers Weekly
"[Hanson's] unusual approach yields new insights about
long-familiar events, making his experiments ingenious and
successful."--America in WWII Magazine
"An extraordinary array of facts and statistics, [The Second World
Wars] offers an account of the fatalism of war."--New Yorker
"An ingenious, always provocative analysis of history's most lethal
war."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"As I struggle in my office to capture Hanson's analytical tour de
force in review, I can see the shelf full of books on World War II
that I've read over the decades. After reading Wars, I believe I
have a firmer grasp of the big picture--very big picture indeed--of
how this conflict began, the various tortuous paths it took, and
how it resolved the way it did than after digesting all of these
other volumes. Reviewers are sometimes over-quick to label a book
essential. For readers who wish to fully understand World War II,
this book is."--American Spectator
"Dr. Hanson has written another well-researched and fascinating
book. [He] does an excellent job of placing World War II in the
historical context of global conflict."--New York Journal of
Books
"Even if you feel like you've read everything and then some about
World War II, you will find a huge amount in [The Second World
Wars] that is new, fascinating, and enlightening. And more than
that, you'll find a way of thinking about how the lowliest
practicalities and logistical challenges of war are connected to
the highest reaches of geopolitics that will change how you think
about both. This is what a great, enduring work of military history
looks like."--Yuval Levin, National Review
"Hansen provides a concise, readable and well-researched volume on
World War II. It is an excellent starting point for those who know
nothing about World War II, and a fresh look at the war for those
knowledgeable about it."--Galveston County's The Daily News
"Hanson is a writer who crunches not only numbers but the text
itself. He has a gift for brevity, exactness, and clarity.
Invariably he brings the wisdom of a lifetime of scholarship, plus
his natural intelligence, to bear on judgments about strategy,
causes, leadership, and results. [The Second World Wars] is a fine
book, rich in both facts and ideas. It is a triumph for an
author/historian with a clear vision, the necessary imagination,
and the intellect to explain the past to us on a vast canvas, with
clarity, a sense of values, and common sense."--Omaha Dispatch
"Hopefully, [The Second World Wars] will become required reading
for students at professional military schools as an introduction to
war in the industrial age as well as to students studying how the
20th century shaped who we are today."--Washington Times
"I couldn't put it down. It is rare to encounter a view of the war
from the multiple perspectives of the six powers, three on each
side, who were the prime combatants, in the elemental theaters of
sea and air and land. The analysis is excellent. The Second World
Wars is a major work of historical narrative and deserves to meet
readers receptive to its riches."--David Lehman, author of
Sinatra's Century
"I loved this book. Strongly recommended."--Tyler Cowen, Marginal
Revolution
"If you think there is nothing more to be said about World War II,
then you haven't read Victor Davis Hanson's The Second World Wars.
Hanson displays an encyclopedic knowledge of every aspect of the
conflict, ranging from land to sea to air, and from grand strategy
to infantry tactics, to analyze what happened and why. Page after
page, he produces dazzling insights informed by his deep knowledge
of military history going all the way back to ancient Greece. The
Second World Wars is compulsively readable."--Max Boot, author of
Invisible Armies, War Made New and The Savage Wars of Peace
"In his exposition of this thesis, displaying a depth of knowledge
of the period that is often simply astounding, Hanson has written
what I consider to be the most important single-volume explanation
of World War II since Richard Overy's Why the Allies Won
(1996)-that is, for a generation."--Andrew Roberts, Claremont
Review of Books
"In his latest work, noted military historian Victor Davis Hanson
provides an utterly original account of what he terms the 'first
true global conflict.'"--History Net
"Lively and proactive, full of the kind of novel perceptions that
can make a familiar subject interesting again."--New York Times
Book Review
"Perceptive and provocative."--American Greatness
"Victor Davis Hanson has delivered another masterpiece-this time a
monumental history of World War II, surpassing all prior attempts
at a comprehensive accounting of that cataclysm. Ranging from the
deserts of North Africa to the islands of the Pacific, Hanson
brings to bear a massive arsenal of insights to illuminate how
strategy, culture, industry, and leadership shaped battlefield
events and doomed the Axis empires."--Mark Moyar, author of Oppose
Any Foe: The Rise of America's Special Operations Forces
"Victor Davis Hanson's history is thematic. The war is dissected
into its constituent parts, allowing the historian to examine at
length aspects of the conflict that would be given short shrift in
a narrative account. What is remarkable is that despite the absence
of a traditional storyline the reader's attention never flags.
Indeed, I have learned more in a few days with this dog-eared
[book] than I have in a lifetime of interest in World War
II."--Washington Free Beacon
"Victor Hanson's comprehensive account of World War II is a wonder.
Where others have supplied a narrative, he provides analysis. He
explores the war's origins; the role played in its conduct by
airpower, sea power, infantry, tanks, artillery, industry, and
generalship; and the reasons why the Allies won and the Axis lost.
This is an eye-opener and a page-turner."--Paul A. Rahe, Hillsdale
College, author of The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The
Persian Challenge
"The Second World Wars by Victor Davis Hanson is breathtakingly
magisterial: How can Mr. Hanson make so much we thought we knew so
fresh and original?"--Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal
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