Ronald A. (rarendt) reviewed Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization on + 107 more book reviews
I only got through the first of the 11 cd's in this offering. If you consider yourself a serious student of history you won't like this book. If you are an antiwar pacifist, who thinks nothing is worth fighting for, you'll love it.
I am a serious student of history, and, having spent over 21 years on active duty in the US military, I started to sense a pattern half way through the first cd. When this happens, I usually look at the reviews on Amazon to see it's just me or if there's really something not right here.
This book got 53 five-star reviews, which isn't too surprising since the jacket blurbs say it was a best seller, but it also got 25 one-star reviews, which I think is more than I've ever seen for any other book. So, while I may be in a minority, I'm not alone in thinking there's a lot to criticize here.
The author cherry-picks his way through mountains of headlines, monographs, copies of speeches, and memoirs. He quotes anything which furthers his premise and discards the rest. This is all arranged chronologically, and for each tidbit the date is pedantically announced. The first cd covers the period from WWI through 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power. According to the reviews I read, the book ends on 12/31/1941, 24 days after Pearl Harbor.
The author lumps Churchill, FDR, and Hitler together in one category - three prejudiced war-mongers who were doing their best to end civilization. As far as I can tell, Stalin is not even mentioned (I only heard the first cd, and didn't read all the reviews). He conveniently quits before Hitler's invasion of Russia, and before the establishment of the Nazi death camps. One review says he covers the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese with one dismissive sentence. Most of the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese prisoners of war are obviously not mentioned, since they occurred after Pearl Harbor. You get the idea...
Life's too short to waste on tripe like this. Some things are worth fighting for; if a lot of us didn't think so, we'd all be either speaking German, Japanese, Russian, or Arabic by now. It must be wonderful to be a pacifist, whose right to spew this sort of garbage has been purchased with the bold of honorable men. How nice to occupy the moral high ground while other people are fighting and dying for you....
I am a serious student of history, and, having spent over 21 years on active duty in the US military, I started to sense a pattern half way through the first cd. When this happens, I usually look at the reviews on Amazon to see it's just me or if there's really something not right here.
This book got 53 five-star reviews, which isn't too surprising since the jacket blurbs say it was a best seller, but it also got 25 one-star reviews, which I think is more than I've ever seen for any other book. So, while I may be in a minority, I'm not alone in thinking there's a lot to criticize here.
The author cherry-picks his way through mountains of headlines, monographs, copies of speeches, and memoirs. He quotes anything which furthers his premise and discards the rest. This is all arranged chronologically, and for each tidbit the date is pedantically announced. The first cd covers the period from WWI through 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power. According to the reviews I read, the book ends on 12/31/1941, 24 days after Pearl Harbor.
The author lumps Churchill, FDR, and Hitler together in one category - three prejudiced war-mongers who were doing their best to end civilization. As far as I can tell, Stalin is not even mentioned (I only heard the first cd, and didn't read all the reviews). He conveniently quits before Hitler's invasion of Russia, and before the establishment of the Nazi death camps. One review says he covers the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese with one dismissive sentence. Most of the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese prisoners of war are obviously not mentioned, since they occurred after Pearl Harbor. You get the idea...
Life's too short to waste on tripe like this. Some things are worth fighting for; if a lot of us didn't think so, we'd all be either speaking German, Japanese, Russian, or Arabic by now. It must be wonderful to be a pacifist, whose right to spew this sort of garbage has been purchased with the bold of honorable men. How nice to occupy the moral high ground while other people are fighting and dying for you....
Powerful, but different than what I expected. The vignettes sprinkled throughout the book are almost akin to (dare I say it) Twitter postings that cumulatively sketch out the outlines of one of the more horrific episodes of world history.
