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While Mr. Baker has a particular point of view, he documents his facts well and supports his beliefs. The book is easy to read because of its short paragraphs framework, which also maintains a certain continuity of the pre-war developments. Certainly makes one think about all the "what ifs."
an amazing and unique way to draw the full and personalized picture of impending doom as the second worldwar and the doctrine horrors approach and are prosecuted.told via extracts from diaries and notes etc of participants on all sides.I could not put the book down.read it in 2 days.
Gandhi succeeded to a degree because the British Empire, at some essential level, was committed to the rule of law. Churchill, for example, was a notoriously loquacious individual, probably the more so after a few drinks. Under regimes like Hitler's and Stalin's, the only recourse would have been to cause the collapse of oppressive regimes by clogging the system with dead bodies. Preferring peace to war is admirable, tho some of the advocates were so self-righteous as to become insufferable.
From a vast body of documentation, Baker plucks a narrow selection of provocative quotes that seem to support his biases to the effect that Churchill was a bloodthirsty warmonger and that Franklin Roosevelt maneuvered the US into war, probably by using the Pacific fleet as bait. A more common and effective method, of which this book is a prime example, is to distort by selection. The problem is not so much that these quotes are not "true" in the sense that they can be documented (altho a serious historian would question the circumstances and motivations) but the way they are strung together. US actions may have hindered the Japanese military, but why was Japan invading China, a larger and more populous country but also one with a much lower standard of living.
The Germans might have evacuated part of France, but what about Alsace-Lorraine and all the smaller countries the Germans had overrun by then. Out of his immense collection of writings and remarks, it is easy enough to find some that put him in a bad light. In order to pursue his agenda, Baker deals with many important episodes with only one or two quotes, while others that might prove instructive, such as the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, the German moves into the Rhineland and Austria, the Italian invasion of Albania, the Spanish Civil War, are ignored. This book might be considered amusing as an example of what can be done with selective distortion, but it is ultimately pernicious because it will be read by many who lack the historical background to see what is going on. People who are not professional historians may assume that if an author intends to distort history to serve some partisan or personal agenda, he will invent or falsify documents.
How did remote and backward Ethiopia provoke Italy into attacking it. Hitler was, indeed, probably eager to make peace with Britain in 1941, but on what terms. The list of these deliberate gaps and oversights could go on indefinitely. Another of these distortions by overemphasis is to inflate the size and importance of the feeble peace movement. The Nazi sympathizer Charles A. The quotes, which are selected largely for shock value, are yanked out of context, with no effort to provide context, as a responsible historian would do. The critical question, which Baker evades, is how realistic were these principles.
By seeking to provoke, rather than inform, Baker takes a fundamentally irresponsible approach to history and encourages all sorts of flawed positions. Lindbergh is elevated above Roosevelt and Churchill. Paradoxically, and probably unintentionally, the abundant selection of Gandhi quotes ends up demonstrating the absurdity and futility of the pacifist position in that era. During the remaining years of the war, beyond the period covered by this book, the Nazis demonstrated that they were fully able to dispose of millions of corpses.
One of the very best books I have read. Tells the real story in a compelling way using news items, diaries, and other primary sources.
Baker seems to think the price was not worth it. Thank goodness the world was not ruled by people like Baker at the time, who would have become so lost in their own contemplation that they would have handed it to Hitler and Tojo on a platter.
I was excited to read a few of them and see the writer's skill with language. Unfortunately, once I got into it I was disheartened to find it a biased work of revisionist history.Readers coming to this book with little knowledge of WWII may be "shocked" to learn that Roosevelt and Churchill were the real warmongers, going against the heroic stories they've heard all their life.
I picked up this book and was excited by its format of dramatizing WWII through paragraph-long anecdotes. While Baker's lengthy endnotes attest to his staggering amount of research, the final book shows that he went into the project determined to make a point and simply cherry-picked facts that would support it.After arguing that the Jews died because we forced Hitler to commit the Holocaust, and that the Rape of Nanking was a result of the Chinese not simply surrendering to the Japanese when they had the chance, he ends the book by asking if the war was worth fighting, and deciding it was not.
They'll be shocked because it simply isn't true. This embarrassingly slanted book is so determined to make the Allies out as villains that it endlessly quotes from Nazi periodicals as if they were legitimate sources and completely overlooks Japan's decade of aggressive actions in the Pacific to make the war America's fault.I was going to write a more lengthy rebuttal of the countless inaccuracies in this book, but I was pleased to find that RedRocker has already done so under the title "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." He intelligently and carefully demolishes this intellectually shabby work of historical fiction.
Instead we had admittedly flawed but decisive men like Roosevelt and Churchill, who had to make some terrible choices, but liberated Europe and the Pacific from brutal oppression. I'd like to see him living in a German-occupied London in 1975, arguing the same inane point.
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