Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Provides an overview of World War II from the invasion of Poland to V-J day, and covers major campaigns and battles.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

Taylor's The Origins of the Second Worm War published in 1962 provoked a furor among historians on both sides of the Atlantic. At the time Taylor's thesis was considered subversive, ""perverse"" and ""flawed from top to bottom."" By treating the outbreak of WW II as a series of diplomatic blunders--he called it ""the unwanted war""--Taylor challenged the most cherished assumption of WW II historiography: the war had been started by Hitler, an evil genius, a madman bent on conquering the world. Thirteen years later Taylor hasn't reneged: ""Hitler lost, as someone has to do in war, and has therefore been written off as a psychopath."" In this brilliant new account of the diplomatic and military course of the conflict Taylor again insists that both Hitler and the Japanese rulers ""far from planning a world war. . . were convinced that a world war would be their ruin."" In this of course they were right. But, as in his devastating account of WW I, Taylor again shows that almost all the logistics and strategies of combat were improvised, and miscalculations abounded. On the much-vaunted British Mediterranean campaign and the grandiose theory that through Italy the Allies were striking at ""the soft underbelly"" of the Third Reich, Taylor comments wryly: ""The British were in the Mediterranean because they were there. They fought there because there was nowhere else for them to fight. This simple fact determined the main weight of British, and later American, strategy until the last year of the Second World War."" From Chamberlain's idiotic guarantee to Poland to the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, Taylor spares no one as he masterfully draws together the separate campaigns and theaters of action. The photographs and captions, though excellent, lack the grim irony of the justly famous pictures in his illustrated history of the First World War. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

British historian A.J.P. Taylor studied at Oxford University and in 1938 became a fellow of Magdalen College. Interested chiefly in diplomatic and central European history, he is a prolific and masterful writer. Fritz Stern wrote of him and his The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848--1918 (1954) in the Political Science Quarterly: "There is something Shavian about A. J. P. Taylor and his place among academic historians; he is brilliant, erudite, witty, dogmatic, heretical, irritating, insufferable, and withal inescapable. He sometimes insults and always instructs his fellow-historians, and never more so than in his present effort to reinterpret the diplomatic history of Europe from 1848 to the end of the First World War. . . . After a brilliant introduction, in which he defines the balance of power and assesses the relative and changing strength of the Great Powers, Mr. Taylor presents a chronological survey, beginning with the diplomacy of war, 1914--1918. . . . [He] writes on two levels. He narrates the history of European diplomacy and compresses it admirably into a single volume. Imposed upon the narrative is his effort to probe the historical meaning of given actions and conditions. . . . He has a peculiar sense of inevitability, growing out of what he regards the logic of a given development, as well as a delicate feeling for live options and alternatives. Mr. Taylor suggests that fear, not aggression, was the dominant impulse of pre-war diplomacy." The Origins of the Second World War (1961), again controversial and lively, starts from the premise (in Taylor's words) that "the war of 1939, far from being premeditated, was a mistake, the result on both sides of diplomatic blunders." The New Statesman said of it: "Taylor is the only English historian now writing who can bend the bow of Gibbon and Macaulay. [This is] a masterpiece: lucid, compassionate, beautifully written in a bare, sparse style, and at the same time deeply disturbing." Several of Taylor's other works also received high praise. Among these were Bismarck, the Man and the Statesman (1955), in which he exonerated Bismarck; Hapsburg Monarchy, 1809--1914, a survey of the era; and English History, 1919--1945, a volume in the Oxford History of England Series, greeted by the N.Y. Review of Books as "an astonishing tour de force." (Bowker Author Biography)