From Munich to Pearl Harbor

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUL 9, 2001

Cambridge University fellow Reynolds (One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945) provides a succinct, accurate account of FDR's rhetoric and policy decisions that positioned America for war in the days between Chamberlain's disastrous 1938 Munich agreement and the attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Despite its brevity, this workmanlike book catalogues FDR's efforts to "educate" America's overwhelmingly isolationist electorate to the need for the U.S. to play a high-profile role in evolving world events. At the same time, it gives a fair Cliffs Notes style summary of FDR's work to support anti-Axis governments up until the time American sentiment swung around to favor intervention, adopting the Lend-Lease bill to re-arm Britain and loosening the constraints of the Neutrality Act. Reynolds posits that America's eventual role in the war set the stage for the nation to become a leader in the postwar confrontation with world Communism. Serious scholars will quibble with at least one aspect of Reynolds's approach. While stating that his book "is rooted" in his "own primary research, particularly in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library (Hyde Park, N.Y.), and in the National Archives and Library of Congress," Reynolds does not favor readers with detailed source notes and instead provides a bibliographical essay focused entirely on published sources, not one of which is linked directly (through footnotes or otherwise) to any of the numerous quotations in the book.