What was the best book about World War II?
I think Gerhard Weinberg’s “A World at Arms” (1994: Cambridge University Press). It’s a single-volume (1,208-page) history of World War II. What’s so good about it is, he looks at it in a holistic fashion, so we understand for the first time how the Balkan uprising affected German war plans. Or what was going on in the Japanese empire in places like Korea or Taiwan or Mainland China and how that affected the war with the British. Or what were people in the Nazi Party talking to Hitler about in terms of alternate plans rather than what actually happened. He understands source material very well and he has an eye for trying to give us a world at war other than just Britain, Germany and the United States. It shows how their ideas filtered out into so many different theaters and how the ultimate result of that is how lucky we were to win. Q: What’s the best anti-war book? A: There was a whole genre of anti-war books that followed the First World War. There are novels such as “All Quiet on
