A Review of “World War II: A New History”

A single-volume history of World War II is an ambitious undertaking, yet a steady stream of such histories, driven by the textbook market for undergraduates, reaches publishers. Occasionally, a new work is published that rises above the textbook label. Evan Mawdsley's World War II: A New History is such a book. Mawdsley, a professor of international history in the department of history at the University of Glasgow has written previous volumes on Soviet history and the Eastern front during World War II. In covering the entire war, Mawdsley's prose captures the feel of a living, breathing narrator telling the reader an epic story and, therefore, compares well with other excellent prose styles, such as John Keegan's in The Second World War (Viking, 1989). This makes it ideally suited for undergraduates but also for a wider audience.