World War II (1931-1945)
“The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” — Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” (1957)
Of the endless ocean of books on the Second World War, we have dozens and dozens of new and carefully chosen titles. I define it as beginning with the Japanese Empire’s invasion of Manchuria and ending with not only V-E and V-J Days but also the immediate crises of displaced people, the Soviet Union’s creation of the Iron Curtain, and the growing revelations of the extent of the Holocaust.
In significant ways the Second World War was the defining crucible of the 20th Century. The First World War was prelude, the legacy of the 19th Century’s imperialism, and the Cold War was the sequel. Of the making of books about it there is no end — but the persistence of good research and good writing, and good publication underscores the war’s centrality of the world we live in today and the world our descendents will live in for the foreseeable future.
The Killing of Reinhard Heydrich: The "Butcher of Prague"
The Killing of Reinhard Heydrich: The "Butcher of Prague"
The extraordinary account of one of the most daring World War II missions, as told in the movie Anthropoid
If anyone warranted assassination during World War II, the man to know was Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) — chief of the security police, rabid anti-Semite, architect of the Final Solution, ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, and Hitler’s most likely successor. In 1941, at the height of the Nazis’ seeming invincibility, the Czech government-in-exile launched a desperate operation to kill Heydrich. From the assassins’ training in England to their Thermopylae-like last stand in the flooded crypt of a Prague church, and the Nazis’ savage reprisals (including the obliteration of two villages), The Killing of Reinhard Heydrich brilliantly recounts one of World War II’s most daring and tragic missions.