Book Review: ‘The Second World War’ by Anthony Beevor

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Anyone attempting to capture the sweep, complexity and scale of the Second World War in a single volume has set themselves a considerable challenge. Anthony Beevor, one of the country’s best known popular historians, has attempted this in a mammoth book of some 850 pages, and to a large extent succeeds. The great strength of this book is its very scope: by adopting a strict temporal construction and therefore looking at events all around the world in chronological rather than regional order, he demonstrates why World War Two was a truly global conflict. This enables the reader to understand the inter-connection between events in the Pacific with those of the Mediterranean, between Normandy and the Eastern Front. This grand sweep, moreover, highlights the complexities of the political facet of the War and while it cannot go into any great depth of the relationship between the various leaders (indeed, rarely goes into any depth in considering any aspect of the fighting) it does bring together all the various aspects of the Second World War, highlighting its very range and impact.

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