The first global conflict

As anyone familiar with Victor Davis Hanson’s writing would expect, his new, exhaustively researched summary of World War II comes from a novel angle and is a very stimulating and original work.1 The war is not approached chronologically, and its origins are only cursorily summarized, but it is examined thematically, as if by a scanner or ultrasound from different perspectives. Thus, the plural title Second World Wars and the subtitle How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. The component analyses are grouped in the vast categories of Ideas, Air, Water, Earth, Fire, People, and Ends. This technique produces, from early on, an extensive variety...