Reviews by Niall

A fully comprehensive and gripping account of the calamity in its entirity. The brutality led me to switch off at times. Completely anglocentric and one would have to wonder at the lowest ever death toll to the Dresden firestorm raid. Macnamara, (Curtis Lemays Speer)completely disagrees with the books conclusions regrding the burning, boiling and baking of japanese civilians...and he was directly responsible!. Nevertheless a massive, sprawling finely detailed canvass of a book...loved it!

From the moment I read the provocative cover, until I finished listening..I was completely spellbound. I had not connected the author as the hard right american presidential nominee who opened Bushs(senior)'92 republican congress. I thought I was listening to a Leon Trotsky refusniks analysis,. Hindsight is 20/20 vision but that does not mean we shouldn't take a cold hard look. Spanning both conflgrations the depth and breadth of the scholarship is impressive but the conclusions incendiary! Most hagiographies of Churchill concede his love of cordite and gunsmoke at the expense of a more measured strategic response. Buchanan asserts the heresy that Churchill was the wrong man at at the wrong time. Buchanan makes the argument that it could all have been different if Hitler (as the Soviet union was post WW2) could have been contained and his eastern expansion would have been checked by that other monster Stalin at great expense to both tyrants. Most standard WW2 histories will acknowledge the irony that the democracies were saved by communisms mercilous prosicution of the eastern war. Buchanan asserts that the war in the west was the wrong war at the wrong time for the western democracies. Britain went to war for Poland, and subsequently abandonded her to a monstrous communist regime (the Katyn forest, to mention one maasacre) under the guise of realpolitik (which wiould have been better employed in '39. Buchanan's analysis of Hitlers designs on Checkoslovakia and Danzig and Memel in will surprise many and were regarded at the time as reasonable territorial claims(though not the methods). Listen, be infuriated, perplexed, the starkness of the heresy and its legacies to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Uncomfortable, fascinating, illuminating, unmissable.