The New York Times Book Review - Josef Joffe
…tales of luck, pluck and doom are not the best reason for plowing through the 600 pages of The Secret War. To begin, the book embodies a herculean research effort down to the minutest detail. Fear not. In spite of its heft, this tome is a real page turner. Screenwriters might cull a few thrillers from the text—and populate them with real-life heroes, fools and traitors. Finally, Hastings provides a welcome reality check for those who draw their spy lore from TV shows or movies like The Imitation Game…For all its focus on the Anglo-American brotherhood, The Secret War also covers the whole front from the French and Dutch resistance to the German Abwehr and the Soviet NKVD. Like the rest, these chapters blend first-rate reportage, finely chiseled portraits and in-depth research. They brim with true tales of sacrifice and petty-mindedness, miraculous breakthroughs and cynical betrayal.
From the Publisher
“[Hastings] brilliantly depicts the byzantine world of intelligence agencies, with dry humor and perception.” - New York Review of Books
“Hastings (Catastrophe: 1914) further solidifies his gift for combining scholarship and readability in this scintillating overview of intelligence operations in WWII...Hastings tells it all in a book everyone interested in WWII should acquire.” - Publishers Weekly
“A fast-moving, highly readable survey of the entire war, in all its phases and on all fronts . . . . This is military history at its most gripping. Of all Max Hastings’s valuable books, this is possibly his best?a veritable tour de force. . . . Though the Second World War has been the subject of immense historical research, Max Hastings here demonstrates how much there is still to know. . . . Hastings draws on eye-witness accounts and anecdotes from soldiers of all armies to show graphically what the war was like for the ordinary people who fought it, and, overwhelmingly, how terrible it was for the combatants. While many of the frontline commanders of each of the belligerent powers come in for some harsh treatment for their ineptitude or bungling, the valour, heroism and, above all, the extraordinary stoicism of their troops amid scarcely imaginable pain, suffering and losses are repeatedly highlighted.” - Evening Standard (London)
“A new, original, necessary history, in many ways the crowning of a life?s work. A professional war correspondent who has personally witnessed armed conflict in Vietnam, the Falkland Islands and other danger zones, Hastings has a sober, unromantic and realistic view of battle that puts him into a different category from the armchair generals whose gung-ho, schoolboy attitude to war fills the pages of a great majority of military histories. He writes with grace, fluency and authority. . . . Inferno is superb.” - New York Times Book Review
“Monumental…a real page turner.” - New York Times Book Review
“Ambitious and often fascinating...This wide-ranging account is filled with compelling characters...A superb survey of an always interesting aspect of warfare.” - Booklist
“[A]n authoritative and engaging book that will stand as the definitive single volume analysis of “The Secret War” for years to come....This is a marvelous book – smart, carefully and exhaustively researched and highly informative. Even those exceptionally knowledgeable about World War II will find it extremely valuable. It is compelling and fascinating reading...[T]he lessons of this important book are both historically important and very timely. - Christian Science Monitor
“[D]efinitive….This is a marvelous book - smart, carefully and exhaustively researched and highly informative. Even those exceptionally knowledgeable about World War II will find it extremely valuable. It is compelling and fascinating reading.” - Christian Science Monitor
Praise for Inferno: “The best one-volume history of the war yet written. . . . It is in all ways a monumental achievement. . . . A relatively brief review can only begin to indicate the depth, breadth, complexity and pervasive humanity of this extraordinary book. The literature of World War II is, as Hastings notes at the beginning of his bibliography, so vast as almost to defy enumeration or comprehension, but Inferno immediately moves to the head of the list.” - Washington Post
