Civilization, The West and the Rest, by Niall Ferguson

According to Ferguson, Western Civilization prospered due to its six "killer apps": namely, competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism, and work.  What's more, the cold war was won because the Soviet Union was incapable of making a decent pair of blue jeans.  I'm not sure if I completely buy all of this, but, like most books willing to tackle big subjects and macro-questions, it is fun and fascinating reading. 

Completed: May 2012
Rating: 7/10

The Storm of War, by Andrew Roberts

"The real reason why Hitler lost the Second World War was exactly the same one that caused him to unleash it in the first place: he was a Nazi."  (That may be the best final sentence in any book I've ever read.)  It was, in short, the shortcomings of Nazi ideology which led to Hitler's stupidest decisions of the War.  These would include Hitler's belief that his soldiers were racially superior to the slavic foes they would face in the East, and the anti-semitism which led his nation's brightest Jewish scientists to defect to and assist the West during the conflict.

I've always wondered about the central paradox of WWII.  In fighting to free Western Europe from a totalitarian dictatorship, why did we ally with another totalitarian dictatorship, and allow that dictatorship to take over Eastern Europe?  This book's anglo-centric, and therefore euro-centric, view of the war went a long way to helping me understand the whys and the wherefores that led to that particular outcome.  The Soviets suffered 90% of the Allied casualties, and inflicted the vast majority of the casualties suffered by the Germans, during the war.  In short, the Allied Nations couldn't have won WWII without Hitler forcing the Soviets' involvement by launching a premature and ill-fated invasion of that nation, whose citizens suffered terribly under Nazi siege, and whose soldiers would ultimately avenge that suffering in terrible acts of retribution against the women of East Berlin.  (Plenty of war crimes to go around in this, at times, extremely depressing read.)  At the end of WWII, who would have wanted to suffer the same fate the Germans had just suffered by launching a war against the Russian empire?  Better to contain and hold them at bay as best we could for another 60 years of cold war. 

This was an amazing book about a subject that we can never do enough to understand: the costliest and bloodiest conflict in all of human history.

Completed: 2012
Rating: 8/10