Max Hastings - Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

Max Hastings - Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

Unabridged, V6, Read by Ralph Cosham


http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/inferno-max-hastings/1100054419?ean=9780307475534

Overview
Winner of the Pritzker Prize for Military History A New York Times Notable Book

From one of our finest military historians, a monumental work that shows us at once the truly global reach of World War II and its deeply personal consequences.

For thirty-five years, Max Hastings has researched and written about different aspects of the war. Now, for the first time, he gives us a magnificent, single-volume history of the entire conflict. Through his strikingly detailed stories of everyday peopleΓÇöof soldiers, sailors and airmen; British housewives and Indian peasants; SS killers and the citizens of LeningradΓÇöHastings provides a singularly intimate portrait of the world at war. Remarkably informed and wide-ranging, Inferno is both elegantly written and cogently argued. Above all, it is a new and essential understanding of one of the greatest and bloodiest events of the twentieth century.

Publishers Weekly
Hastings continues a recent substantial body of general audience writing on WWII (Armageddon; Retribution,) in this equally well-researched and well-presented account focusing on the conflictΓÇÖs human dimension, looking at both soldiers and civilians, members of both Allies and Axis. For millions of ordinary people the war was ΓÇ£hell let loose,ΓÇ¥ imposing, at the least, drastic change and, at worst, incomprehensible horrorΓÇö60 million died. Participants assembled the ΓÇ£vast jigsaw puzzleΓÇ¥ of war with the pieces they had and made sense of it in terms of their own circumstances. Hastings succeeds admirably in synthesizing the results in a globe-girdling context from Guadalcanal to the Dnieper River. He establishes, in some sense, the temporary nature of warΓÇöthat soldiers seldom lost their identity as civilians in uniform, and civilians counted the days until normality returned. That mind-set determined the warΓÇÖs nature: structured by mass participation and institutional effectiveness. In Russia, for instance, the German invasion led to ΓÇ£a surge of popular enthusiasmΓÇ¥ to support Russia, followed rapidly by despair and men trying to evade the draft. As Hastings makes clear, the warΓÇÖs impact also outlasted the conflict: for decades people judged one another by their wartime behavior; for many the psychological impact of the horrors never left them.