Blood and Ruins

This is Overy's best work. It may be the best book ever written about World War 2. Why was World War Two so catastrophic? Why did the Axis continue to fight once it was clear they would be defeated? Why did the combatants engage in barbarism? The big questions are answered, maybe definitively. The book actually appears that Overy changed direction in the middle of writing the book, keeping the sections on the general narrative of how the war went and how it was fought at the front and the home front while adding the answers to the big "why" questions. The book is over 800 pages and the font is small. The book can be difficult to read because of the sheer depravity and barbarism that Overy shows us in order to answer the questions the book poses. The book has extensive citations so that scholars can continue the work and readers can dig deeper.

Overy, a great academic, has written another wonderful exegesis of the series of wars that coalesced into World War II. At first, I thought, of course they were imperial wars, but Overy with his acumen for taking a subject that has been well-written about, yet shedding a new perspective on it, has done it again. Industrious and skilful, Overy weaves into his analysis the positions of countries defending dying empires, those who felt entitled to one and others that arose phoenix-like from the ashes of the Second World War, such as the Soviet Union and U.S.A, to become super powers. A great book!

Das Wertvolle an dem Buch ist der neue Blickwinkel. Statt Chronologie gibt es einen genauen Blick auf inhaltliche Zusammenhänge auf allen Kriegsschauplätzen. Der Autor ist frei von nationaler Voreingenommenheit.Das Buch ist unbedingt zu empfehlen!

A very long-read indeed. While this numbers some 880 pages of prose to read through it is densely packed with argument and evidence and if you're reading the hardback, each page has probably twice or three times as much as another book. There's a lot here. And it's very good.Overy broadly (and correctly in my view) takes the period of the Second World War to start from from the conflicts of some of its belligerents and contextualises it as a culmination of several hundred years of colonial history. The book starts off then recounting pre-WWI and WWI history, establishing the world that led to the 1930s and shaped the outlook of the belligerents and makes a compelling case for the undercurrents as driven by the desire to conquer, annex, populate and exploit. An excoriating view of the Allies and Axis alike is a natural byproduct.He then takes us through book-length chapters exploring themes - logistics and emotion and genocide etc - in vast detail while never succumbing to the desire to caricature the players as simply good and evil forces. It's a complex tapestry woven. At times Empire appears to slip away as the detail forms an academic military history but Overy always brings it back.The weakest part of the work is towards the end, summing up the period broadly between 1945 and 1962: the collapse of empire. It feels rushed and unexplored (while I appreciate the focus of the book, as the title suggests is the war itself: Overy's focus is on it within the context of Empire). We're left with a lot of white space as to the imperial-like developments across the remainder of the 20th century. What of the First Gulf War? What of Afghanistan? Iraq? And now we have Russia and Ukraine and China and Taiwan begging for historical analaysis. Perhaps saved for a follow-up.As it stands, this is up there with the best academic works on the Second World War.

The content is dense and fascinating, but the actual book is so badly bound, despite being a hard-cover, that by page 271, the pages were coming out from the binding. Now the book is a disaster of loose pages. For the price charged, this is not impressive and does great disservice to the author. Not worth buying if you have to fight the actual way the book is produced.