Product Description

The history of the Second World War, with its horrible twists
and turns, is so well known that the major events and their outcomes have
taken on a sort of inevitability. It has become, in effect, a tragedy with
each leader and each country playing an assigned part.

Ian Kershaw's extraordinarily thought-provoking and gripping new book,
Fateful Choices, demolishes any such sense of inevitability. He examines
closely ten episodes at the heart of the War where there was an immense
range of options open to planners and decision-makers. From declarations of
war down to operational priorities, choices were made that could have
resultedin an almost unrecognisably different conflict.

Kershaw, not least through his immense work on the career of Adolf Hitler,
has spent many years thinking about the contigent nature of history.
Fateful Choices dramatizes brilliantly and distressingly events that
between them could have resulted in disaster or victory - either for the
Allies or for the Axis.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8126 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-07
• Binding: Hardcover
• 656 pages

Robert McCrum, The Observer
On almost every page, it sparkles

Anthony Beevor, author of STALINGRAD
Fateful Choices is an immensely wise book

Independent
'Compelling, and chilling ... Fateful Choices shows how the Second
World War could have turned out very differently ... required reading'

Customer Reviews

Great idea, poor execution
I agree with the reviewer Elizabeth Kyten. Clearly, 1940-41 is the key period of WWII, casting shadows onto the years and decades beyond. But Kershaw's treatment of the theme is poor, focusing (as it does) solely on elite politics and written (as it is) in a pinched, monographical way, BY a historian, FOR other specialist historians (or similarly oriented students). Unless you want to know, for example, what a particular memo said on any one day of a key period selected by the author, give this book a miss. Although Kershaw ranges widely in his secondary reading (the book is very well researched), frankly one expects more than a compendium of that research from a historian of Kershaw's rank. The focus on elite actors - each chapter revolves around a very small group of people - gives the book a very narrow feel. Perhaps the most damning aspect, however, is the prolixity of the writing. Like a PhD thesis. Not many historians can write as vividly as Beevor, but this book should have been edited, and edited, then edited again. Badly written and too long at half the length. I say this as someone who studied history at UK universities (including the LSE, where IK taught, though for the record he did not teach me). Kershaw has been lauded for his contributions to the history of the Third Reich, but he needs to peel away the knighthood, the tv documentary attributions, the glowing broadsheet profiles, and remember what he is: a historian. This book is a shadow of what it could have been. Indeed, it's a shadow of what Kershaw himself could have made it had he not been in such a rush to go to print. Less is more.

Informative, but a HUGE pain to get through.
This book is excellent in concept. Certainly, when learning about World War II, one wonders why certain decisions were made. For me, this was particularly true of the German decision to invade the Soviet Union and Hitler's choice to declare war on the United States. The fact that both questions were addressed in this book was one of the things that drew me to it.

This book is well-researched. However, I found it to be nearly unreadable. It is extremely dense and very circuitous in terms of sentence structure. In essence, it is not concise enough. When I got to the end of a section I would often have trouble remembering what the main points of it were because I was having so much trouble following it. I'm sure that part of my frustration was due to the fact that a crazy college schedule made it necessary for me to read it in short segments. However, I am also sure that the 470-page book could have been written in at least 2/3 of the words.

This book drove me crazy, and although I came out of reading it with a better understanding of World War II, I would gladly exchange the knowledge for a little bit of my lost sanity.

well-written, but no breaking news
This is a very well-written narrative that you will find hard to put down once you have started reading. At the same time, those already fairly familiar with the history of WW II will find much that they already knew. For them it is hardly a surprise that Hitler reached his decisions without consulting anyone, that Stalin refused to believe that Russia was about to be attacked, that Mussolini was obsessed with the fear of being left out of the glory and spoils of the war that Hitler seemed to be winning hands down, and that it took Rooseveld a lot of cajoling to get his isolationist country into the war. But these are stories very well told, to the extent that you are annoyed that the story simply stops once the decision has been reached. But of course that is the point of this book.
Certainly for those who only know the big picture on WW II-history, this book provides valuable insight in how its major developments came about.