Sir Martin Gilbert was knighted in 1995 "for services to British history and international relations." Among his many books are The Righteous, The Holocaust, The Day the War Ended, and Churchill: A Life. He lives in London, England.
"In his transmission of the horror of the war, Martin Gilbert has
achieved something no other historian but he could. There is indeed
a relentless force about chronology when it is used as a tool by an
historian of the stature of Martin Gilbert."
-The Sunday Telegraph "Gilbert's flowing narrative is spiced with
anecdotal details culled from diaries, memoirs, and official
documents. He is especially skillful at interweaving summaries of
military strategy with vignettes of civilian suffering." -Newsweek
Though few one-volume histories of World War II have been published in the last ten years, the 50th anniversary of the war's start has inspired new works: Gilbert's book and John Keegan's The Second World War (reviewed in this issue, p. 102) are two of them. Gilbert's is less a battle history than Keegan's. For Gilbert (biographer of Churchill and Holocaust historian, author of the massive The Holocaust, LJ 2/1/86) the movements of armies and the decisions of statesmen were ultimately the consequences of Nazi and Japanese racial policies. Thus the struggles and fates of Axis victims are essential to the complete history of war, which inflicted such unprecedented suffering on innocent parties. Gilbert uses this perspective to present the war from an original angle. Accounts of campaigns and conferences are directly juxtaposed to descriptions of atrocities and resistance. Gilbert draws his human interest not from battlefields and home fronts, as do most histories of the war, but from concentration camps and ghettoes. In so doing he reminds us that World War II was a ``good war,'' because it was fought against tyrannies that perpetuated obscenities as a matter of principle. Recommended for all collections.-- Dennis E. Showalter, Colorado Coll., Colorado Springs
"In his transmission of the horror of the war, Martin Gilbert
has achieved something no other historian but he could. There is
indeed a relentless force about chronology when it is used as a
tool by an historian of the stature of Martin Gilbert."
-The Sunday Telegraph "Gilbert's flowing narrative is spiced
with anecdotal details culled from diaries, memoirs, and official
documents. He is especially skillful at interweaving summaries of
military strategy with vignettes of civilian suffering."
-Newsweek
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