What They Didn't Teach You About World War II
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Packed with personal anecdotes and details you won’t find anywhere else, this is the secret history of World War II.
“A fast-moving overview stuffed with interesting factoids and historical tidbits . . . Casual readers will find themselves carried along, and hardened military buffs will learn much that is new.”—Library Journal
“It’s almost guaranteed to make you so interested in the subject you’ll want to learn . . . By including hundreds of interesting anecdotes and facts, [Mike] Wright not only piques our interest repeatedly, he also gives areal feel for the war era.”—Manchester Journal Inquirer
“An excellent overview . . . [with] interesting chapters on spies, POWs, censorships, and the building of the atomic bomb . . . Wright’s style is accessible.”—The Post and Courier
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As he did in What They Didn't Teach You About the Civil War, Wright proposes here to tell the "human story" behind the conventional narrative of dates, names and battles that ostensibly destroyed general interest in history. His background as a TV writer and producer is reflected in a work that is the printed equivalent of sound bites. That Wright presents little original or unfamiliar material is not a crippling weakness. He describes this work as an "appetizer to the banquet of the war's history," and targets a general audience presumably unfamiliar with that history. Just such an audience, however, is likely to face bewilderment when confronted by two dozen chapters whose topics appear to have been selected virtually at random and that are presented in no discernible order. A chapter on submarines is followed by one on Pearl Harbor, which is in turn succeeded by a discussion of censorship. Two chapters consist entirely of capsule summaries of the wartime experiences of public figures ranging from George Bush to Marcel Marceau. Even the chapters with a stated theme as a rule consist of anecdotes that are juxtaposed rather than integrated. Some focus entirely on the American experience; others incorporate material from other Allied and Axis states, again with no explanation. The result is not the recovery of untaught history, so much as a literary equivalent of channel-surfing. Photos not seen by PW.
