Reviews for Prentice-Hall Author's Guide

The average rating for Prentice-Hall Author's Guide based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-01-24 00:00:00 Matthew Yohn A few years ago I had read and thoroughly enjoyed this author's fine dual biography,Lee and Grant and then found this book at a library sale. It is equally well written and I was not disappointed. Although much of the information contained in this description of the summer leading up to the beginning of WWII is well known, the author's portraits of Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler and their governments are very well drawn. He sets the stage with the fateful meeting at Munich when Chamberlain declared "peace in our time" and quickly moves to the continuing plans of aggression by Germany and Hitler's derision of the Munich Accord. The reader is privy to meetings in all the countries involved where plans, subplots, and double-crosses were in full swing. Particular attention is paid to Stalin who was as murderous and dishonest as Hitler and played the Allies like a fiddle. All the pieces were in place for a deadly chess game and when Poland was finally attacked, all bets were off. A clear picture of a very troubling time which still makes historians shake their heads and wonder "what were they thinking". Recommended..

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-02 00:00:00 LAURENT MIRABEL I don't remember exactly when I read it; my notes are from 2016-06-26, in a little snippet entitled "America's Dark Summer" in my notes on my phone. The book recounts the events and moods in the capitals of Europe in the Summer of 1939. It is a good reminder that we cannot predict the future. Even those who saw war coming did not see the shocker plot twist--a pact of convenience between Hitler the Nazi and Stalin the Communist--and the scope of the war which came.