Books : History : World History : World War II 1939-1945 : General AAS

• Home
• US Store
• Electronics
• Computers
• Sitemap

Books : History : World History : World War II 1939-1945 : General AAS

• Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West

  Andrew Roberts

  
  
   

• The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster (Allen Lane History)

  Richard J. Evans

  
  
   

• Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944--45

  Max Hastings

  
  
   

• Nella Last's Peace: The Post-war Diaries of Housewife 49

  
  
   

• Resistance: Memoirs of Occupied France

  Agnes Humbert

  
  
   

• Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of 'Housewife 49'

  
  
   

• Stranger in the House: Women's Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War

  Julie Summers

  
  
   

• If This Is a Man / The Truce

  Primo Levi

  
  
   

• Dambusters: A Landmark Oral History

  Max Arthur

  
  
   

• Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Traitor, Hero, Spy

  Ben Macintyre

  
  
   

• Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (Allen Lane History)

  Mark Mazower

  
  
   

• Bomber Boys: Fighting Back 1940-1945

  Patrick Bishop

  
  
   

• The Railway Man

  Eric Lomax

  
  
   

• Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chamber

  Filip Muller

  
  
   

• Make Do and Mend: Keeping Family and Home Afloat on War Rations (Official Wwii Info Reproductns)

  Foreword by Jill Norman

  
  
   

• Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-45

  Max Hastings

  
  
   

• A Woman in Berlin: Diary 20 April 1945 to 22 June 1945

  Anonymous

  
  
   

• Austerlitz

  W.G. Sebald

  
  WG Sebald's Austerlitz has something of the fractured narrative and wanderlust of his novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, and continues to develop their obsession with history, loss and memory--or more precisely in this case, forgetting. In the decade since the original German publication of Vertigo, Sebald has established himself as indisputably one of Europe's most interesting and lauded writers.

  In 1967, the narrator bumps into a man in the salle de pas perdus of Antwerp's Central Station. Thus begins a long if intermittent acquaintance, during which he learns the life story of this stranger, retired architectural historian Jacques Austerlitz. Raised as Dafydd Elias by a strict Welsh Calvinist ministry family, it is only at school that Austerlitz learns his true name--and only years later, by a series of chance encounters, that he allows himself to discover the truth of his origins, as a Czech child spirited away from his mother and out of Nazi territory on the Kindertransport. He returns to confront the childhood traumas that have made him feel that "I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life."

  In this writer's hands, Austerlitz's tale of personal emotional repression becomes a metaphor for Europe's smothered past. Sebald wittily explores the tricks of time and space, unearthing Europe as an unconscious palimpsest. Delighting in lists and unfeasibly lengthy descriptions, Sebald can turn anything to poetry--even the alleged health benefits of Marienbad's Auschowitz springs become "a positive verbal coloratura of medical and diagnostic terms" (luckily, all his characters seem to be able to hold forth this way). Indeed, Sebald writes with such preternatural lucidity that even a harrowing account of writer's block ironically becomes a celebration of his own quite clearly unblockable virtuosity.

  At heart, though, Austerlitz is a serious indictment of modern Europe's "avoidance system", its repeated patterns of personal and institutional forgetting that, even within Austerlitz's own lifetime, have contrived to obscure, ignore and render irretrievable his past and the source of his pain. And yet, despite the bleakness of that picture, the book ends with its hero--and its readers--committed to trying, at least, to remember. --Alan Stewart

  
   

• Hitler

  Ian Kershaw

  
  Is there anything fresh to be said about Hitler? He is an icon, maybe the icon, of the 20th century. He was a failed artist with Wagnerian fantasies, a slob who could not get up in the morning, but he exposed the frailties of modern civilisation in a way that should still make us giddy. How? Was it his doing, or German society's?

  Professor Ian Kershaw has produced a work of definitive scholarship that will be the standard for years to come. It was badly needed; since Alan Bullock's 1952 classic Hitler: A Study In Tyranny and Joachim Fest's Hitler (originally published in 1973) there has been much valuable research, all of which Kershaw seems to have read (there are 200 pages of notes). Add to this the media (and, by extension, public) fascination with the nature of evil, and a resurgent interest in right-wing groups, and this book becomes long overdue.

  Kershaw deals rigorously with the bones of his subject's life. He has no truck with psychological padding, and calmly demolishes most of the quasi-facts that have sprung up--if in doubt, he allows space within the chronology. His description of the path to the Chancellorship, which was always more messy than messianic, is painful to behold but gripping to follow, and concludes in 1936 with Hitler at the height of his "Hubris".

  This is an important study of the character of power, as clearly written as it is intellectually engaging. --David Vincent

  
   

• Arnhem: Jumping the Rhine 1944 and 1945

  Lloyd Clark