This is a big book! Essentially a history of WW2, but looking more at the big picture, at patterns. Some concrete details to make the pattern clear, but then lots of statistics too. There's a grand theory here to provide a thread... empires just coming off their peak, economic instability, and ethnic diversity at the block by block level, turning into neighbor against neighbor, families against themselves. But really the thread of theory is not enough to carry the weight of the facts, or I couldn't fit it all together anyway. But the theory does give a perspective, a way to organize the facts. It works well enough for that.

People treating other people as sub-human. That seems like the new feature of 20th Century brutality. Hmmm. That'd be another angle that would be useful here, that Ferguson doesn't bring in, not that I recall. Philosophers have remarked on Mass Man... Dostoevsky and the existentialists... how ideology somehow aligns people in any crazy direction... perhaps it's mass media, radio, TV...

The Epilog discusses events since WW2. Yeah Western Europe has been pretty peaceful, but the Balkans, Rwanda, Cambodia... crazy ideological ethnic slaughter has hardly slowed. Strange, the book was published in 2006, but there is no mention of bin Laden and al Qaeda.... but the book must have been pretty far along by then...

This book doesn't really answer anything. The explanatory framework really just makes more coherent the real questions. Yeah another monster here... one statistic, in the WW2 timeframe, the USA produced 75% of world petroleum. Ferguson does not look at the big picture of resource depletion. We have moved largely from empires to a global society. As this whole network crumbles... it is sure hard to be optimistic... if this kind of mechanized slaughter is the wave we are caught up in... it has yet to crest... ( )

Prefixed by a strange rant about race but from then on it's completely engrossing. Seamlessly covers the wars and their aftermath. Nothing is sanitised, unless you're a psychopath, this will be a hard and depressing read. ( )

I simply recall reading a section on pogroms in the Baltics after the Nazi invasion, shortly therafter the battery in my wife's car died and we were stranded, albeit somewhat, at the supermarket, I walked home to drive back my truck and in that hazy period at least three total strangers stepped up to offer an entire spectrum of assistance. ( )

Highly recommend it. One of the best history books I have ever read. And changed my perception on a lot of things. Poles attacking Jews after they left the concentration camp gave me a new belief in necessity of the State of Israel as a safe haven for Jews. ( )

This history is epic in its breadth and scope. ( )